Although lacking a song quite as year-defining as Rihanna’s Umbrella in 2007, the past 12 months saw three singles by female artists dominate the airwaves. Duffy, Katy Perry and Estelle all released records that topped the charts, each of them examples of just how skilful and precision-targeted contemporary songwriters and producers are, and each testament to the power female artists currently enjoy as names above the title, if not — still — behind the scenes. Musically unalike they may be, but Mercy, I Kissed a Girl and American Boy share some significant characteristics. What these tell us about commercially high-achieving music in 2008 — and where it’s headed in the coming year — is instructive, if mostly depressing.

Nobody — not least the dependably candid Estelle herself — would deny that American Boy’s progress up the charts was aided by the presence on the track of Kanye West. Or that Perry’s I Kissed a Girl didn’t gain vital commercial traction from its lyrics’ explicit flirtation with what might be termed safe Sapphism. Nor would any but the most wide-eyed fan pretend that Duffy’s breakthrough hit wasn’t a beneficiary of the appetite for repro Motown created by Mark Ronson’s increasingly ubiquitous supermarket soul. Packaging and marketing, the making of useful alliances, the focus on specific demographics: these are scarcely new developments in pop.

Nor are the convoluted journeys the three singers undertook before striking gold especially remarkable. The record business may still know how to position then promote the hell out of a new artist, but it is also a deeply cautious and slow-moving beast. Perry was a Christian singer who made a gospel album, jumped ship for the manufactured-pop scene in America, changed her surname and image and, after several false starts, finally hit pay dirt. Duffy is a failed Welsh X Factor competitor who was taken under the wing of a management company, which apparently required a bewildering three years to hone its new signing’s sound before she was deemed fit for public consumption. And Estelle was briefly hailed as the queen of British hip-hop in 2004, had a couple of hits, fell out with her label and had to cross the Atlantic to achieve the sort of success many felt she so richly deserved.

Look at our selection of 2008’s best songs (below). It is, inevitably, subjective, but our conviction, based on 12 months of close scrutiny, is that this year has been one that fizzed with creativity, daring and innovation — and authenticity. On all 20 songs, you can hear the artist: they occupy their creation and you have faith in it, and them, accordingly. That isn’t to say that every track represents confessional catharsis. Elbow’s Weather to Fly is undoubtedly autobiographical, imbued with nostalgia and alive with emotion; Ladyhawke’s Dusk Till Dawn is comparatively lightweight and trivial. Yet the latter is no less genuine as a document of its creator’s passion and commitment.

The only one of our trinity of chart-toppers to make the list, you will notice, is Estelle. That is not just because American Boy is a sensational song. It is also, crucially, because the singer is absolutely in the thick of it: she may have packed her bags for New York, but, within the superfly grooves of will.i.am’s arrangement, her real voice, her gobby, take-it-or-leave-it, wilful west London personality, isn’t just present and correct, it’s all over the track.

Contrast that with Perry and Duffy. The former can’t be blamed for opportunism — what is the pop business, after all, but a stage for people who are prepared to grab the main chance and hold on to it for dear life? And I Kissed a Girl’s bubblegum techno/glam-rock is (thanks, surely, to Cathy Dennis’s typically astute contribution) an addictive sonic brew, bristling with sass and swagger, albeit so closely modelled on P!nk’s brand of sexually ambiguous porno-pop, it’s practically cohabiting. But the overriding impression is of a singer who, rather like Nicole Kidman’s gimlet-eyed, morally flexible weather girl in the film To Die For, will try just about anything to become a star. You can’t deny the gambit succeeded. Listen to I Kissed a Girl, then to MGMT’s Time to Pretend. Both are songs about fantasy scenarios, tongue-in-cheek projections of one existence onto another. Both use bracingly eccentric pop music to get their message across. Only one is a humorous, satirical burst of social commentary, and it isn’t Perry’s.

Duffy, in terms of image a wonderfully brassy-looking, fag-ash bottle blonde, as a singer comes across as someone with a voice to launch a thousand cruise ships, not tear at the emotional fabric of a song. This is most apparent live, where her strange tentativeness seems less to do with a naturally shy demeanour than with an artistic detachment. But it’s there on disc, too. Her songs are superbly designed but stubbornly motionless vehicles for her foghorn rasp. Mercy needs to be messy with longing, lust, confusion and tear-drenched mascara. But it’s immaculate, not a hair or emotion out of place. Looking for a masterclass in the classic soul-music mix of restraint and urgency? That’ll be Al Green’s All I Need.

When Estelle sizes up all those American males, there is a sense that, the minute she stops scoffing at the less prepossessing among her suitors, she’s going to wrestle one of the prize specimens to the floor. She’s not playing at it. One of these three songs will stand the test of time. Two of them will be influential in the short term: expect to hear lots more sexless retro soul and innuendo pop in 2009. So, Estelle is the odd one out here. What else sets her apart? Oh, she made one of the songs of the year. DC

1 TIME TO PRETEND — MGMT

The year’s most memorable synthesizer line, lashings of brass, cymbals and drums, a giant psych-pop of a tune, a lyric that seemed both to satirise and aspire to the rock-star lifestyle, and a wonderfully shambolic payoff (“I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah!’ ”): the American duo reminded us just how classic but cussedly individual singles should be made.

2 GRAFTON STREET — Dido

No more coffee-table music for Dido. Her album Safe Trip Home was a giant step forward, and Grafton Street — a song about the death of her father — was its sad but beautiful core. Empathetic keyboards by Brian Eno and an unlikely recorder solo frame the acceptance of loss: “Nothing’s left that’s safe here now, / Nothing will bring you home, / Nothing can bring us the peace / We had in Grafton Street.”

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