It’s August 2008 and the music industry as we know it is a wasteland. CD sales are plummeting. Record stores are shutting up shop. The talent-contest formula on television is limping on, while, privately, executives are conceding defeat. Low-grade, stir’n’serve manufactured pop of the Rachel Stevens variety isn’t selling. Boys with guitars are everywhere. And following the critical failure of Madonna’s overcommercialised, zeitgeist-missing 11th album — and as a special treat to celebrate her birthday yesterday — Saga, the travel company for the over-fifties, has invited the now eligible star on holiday. Pop, it is probably safe to say, is in its death throes.

Are we sure? Wait! What’s that? Over the horizon, a clucking noise. Or is it more of a squawk? Gathering like an army of hungry Norse huntswomen on the crest of the hill, a raggle-taggle band of girls stumbles into sight. Strange-looking ladies, admittedly: a Swede in a billowing white shirt, a French girl wrapped in an orange silk robe, a pale Norwegian, a shy New Zealander with gappy teeth and an American in a Malcolm X T-shirt. And they are not alone — there are more of them, many more, each one as idiosyncratic and singular as the one before. And coming up in the rear, a battalion of bloggers and MySpace fans, their loyal foot soldiers.

The last time we had female pop stars who were truly themselves was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when pop filled a crater in a cultural landscape laid bare by punk. And what a vintage line-up it turned out to be: Stevie Nicks, Debbie Harry, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and the Material Girl herself, to name a few.

Now, these ladies are back. Only with new names, faces and stories. Santogold, Lykke Li, Annie, Ladyhawke and Camille. Bat for Lashes and Imani of Little Jackie. Florence Welch, Ava Leigh and Victoria Hesketh of Little Boots.

These ladies aren’t puppets, or blank canvases for other people’s dreams. They write their own songs, produce their own albums and set up their own record labels to get heard. They want to sing brilliant songs to people who “get” them. They aren’t sweating the bottom line. As Peter Robinson of the website Popjustice says: “You don’t need to find an audience if your audience finds you.” On blogs, on MP3 download sites, on someone’s ring tone — anywhere but HMV.

Meet the new 2.0 pop tarts. They’re answerable to nobody. They’re also, like, totally gorgeous. And slightly mad. But then, so is everyone else.

Santogold

“How do I feel about Britney, Kylie, Girls Aloud? Bong! Knock the door down and come kickin’ in. I’m like, get that shit outta here! No, really! I’m not really shittin’ on them, but you know — time for somethin’ new?”

Santogold, aka Philadelphia-born, 32-year-old Santi White, is the something new she’s talking about. And she’s about as far from the Britney/Kylie/Girls Aloud mould as it gets. Her music is an unpindownable hybrid of all her musical influences, from the Pixies through Aretha Franklin to the Police. See her on stage and her kind of sexy is goofy. She leaps around and stamps and shakes her hips. And away from it all, she isn’t interested in glitz. Yet she’s still pop. “Pop songs have a formula. You follow the rules, but then you go crazy inside them.”

You can trust White on this. She and the entertainment industry are like that. She wrote, among many things, Lily Allen’s Littlest Things. She sang a cover of the Jam’s Pretty Green on Mark Ronson’s Version. She shares a manager with Coldplay, goddamit. All that without being packaged, as was threatened, as the “black Gwen Stefani”.

“It’s hard to be a woman and also to have a strong sense of who you are,” says White. “I’ve had to learn to be extra strong-willed. People assume I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do know what I’m talking about, and I do know what I want.”

Her fiancé, Trevor — low-rise jeans, skateboard, goatee — arrives. He thinks boys make better snowboarders than girls; she disagrees. “But you’re a woman, and you make better music than I do,” says Trevor. “And I would be down with it if girls ruled the world, you know that.”

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