There are plans afoot to rumble the empire of the world’s most powerful pop entrepreneur. Simon Cowell, whose X-Factor winner has been virtually guaranteed a number one entry, not to mention the prestigious Christmas top spot, for a number of years now, is facing a guerilla strategy to block a repeat of such a feat in 2009.

Launched via Facebook, Rage Against the Machine for No.1 is a campaign that calls upon millions of social networkers to shove an almighty spanner into the Cowell-driven mechanism and put the Californian band’s ‘Killing in the Name’ atop the pile when the UK’s seasonal chart is announced on Sunday, December 20th.

The battle looks like being a tough one for The X-Factor if we are to believe the numbers already rallying to the Rage cause – over 375,000 have joined the bid to date – and, if all of those individuals do buy the track in question within the qualifying time-frame, it is hard to see how they can fail to prevent a conveyor-belt crooner from hitting the heights on this occasion.

It is difficult to work out how such a coordinated plan could have worked before the onset of downloading. For a start, the high street record retailers of old were utterly geared to the industry scheme – they had the material the labels wanted us to purchase. Only if HMV or Virgin could lay their hands hundreds, even thousands, of copies of a particular single could customers buy them in store.

To have asked for ‘Killing in the Name’ as a one-off track on CD, once it had enjoyed a brief early life as an actual single, would have been impossible. It wouldn’t have even been stocked after a few weeks.

Now, of course, there are millions of tracks available to us at the click of a mouse and, with this piece of orchestrated subversion in place, there seems little reason why one of rock’s most politically-directed acts shouldn’t enjoy the belated glow of a hit parade smash 17 years after the song first reared its head.

Riddled with the word ‘fuck’, the anti-war song caused certain notoriety on its 1992 release when the BBC’s Radio 1 Chart Show played an uncensored version of the piece as it hit the lower reaches of the chart back then. But ‘Killing in the Name’, with the en masse aid of the Facebook posse, is heading for a loftier ascent this time around.

If this does happen, what might it all mean? Well, we may see it as triumph for a certain form of people power. Though the people, we might argue, have already expressed their own power by propelling one of Olly Murs, Stacey Solomon or Joe McElderry, the three surviving singers who feature in this weekend’s final, into this poll position. One of them will be crowned X-Factor winner after a Saturday and Sunday of blockbuster shows with the popular vote deciding on the champ.

There is little doubt that X-Factor has infused the British pop scene with an energy and dynamism it has not seen for some decades. With audiences of around 15 million tuning in to watch the weekly sing-offs, the interest levels in indigenous popular music has not been this high since Beatlemania and the early incarnations of the now extinct Top of the Pops.

The power of this small screen vehicle – and its US counterpart American Idol which Cowell, of course, also fronts – is plainly evident from the calibre of major established stars who have been flocking to appear in the results show. Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, Lady Gaga….the parade of the greatest names in this particular firmament hustling for live slots on ITV1 has been quite astonishing.

Add to that, the stellar supporting line-up for the imminent final – George Michael, Robbie Williams, Michael Buble and Paul McCartney – and you really do get the sense that X-Factor is the only place to be for the highest-profile, biggest names in musical entertainment.

With the broader industry – represented by the major labels, Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner – in a state of free-fall, unable to revive its mega-profits of the 1990s and seemingly incapable of turning gradually rising electronic sales into a sustainable financial model, such prime time TV smashes are managing to keep the stars, not to mention Cowell himself, firmly in the public eye.

But this scenario is also skewing the marketplace in a way that might be regarded as quite unhealthy. Why should a desperately old version of pop performance – moderately talented but actually anonymous singers covering other people’s songs in a variety framework that everyone thought the Beatles had killed forever – be the only game in town?

Why should Leona Lewis – now a bona fide American superstar to boot – Alexandra Burke and JLS, all recent X-Factor beneficiaries, not forgetting Britain’s Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle, be so dominating of the UK popular music scene that new bands and performers, original composers and talented songwriters, with their own distinctive identity and voice, are utterly over-shadowed by mainstream pulp?

The Rage Against the Machine for No. 1 strategy could pull off something fascinating. It could score a notable victory  for independent-minded rock fans who still believe that music should be about something more substantial than manufactured romance and commercial sales.

But it will, naturally, prove a one-off. Simon Cowell, and business partner Simon Fuller, are not about to knocked off their dominating perch. Yet, as his audacious campaign to become master of the uiverse gains momentum – with multi-million dollar business moves in train with British retail billionaire Philip Green and an X-Factor experience about to hit Las Vegas, Barack Obama himself may soon be playing second fiddle – it would be a small coup to see his complacent smile, his smug demeanour, reminded that there are opinions other than his that count.