There is exciting pop music out there, but it seems to be even more at the fringes of 'popular' music than it was when I were a young thing and me and my best friend were going silly over this strange pixie woman singing in Icelandic on the Indie chart on C4's (then excellent) The Chart Show.

Nevertheless, with tools like Gnoosic / MusicMap, YouTube, Grooveshark etceteras, good pop is much easier to actually discover now than ever, so we're no longer dependent on the late John Peel to act as our musical ears and likewise there's no excuse for limiting oneself to the safe formulas of the top ten muzak machine either - where the so-called 'art' of performers like Gaga, still regurgitates the same top ten formulas of twenty plus years ago.