With 2009 drawing to a close, the BBC has already started mapping out who's going to be hip and cool in 2010, announcing their long list for the BBC Sound of 2010 poll.
In the Beeb's own words:
The list is designed to highlight the most exciting musical talent for the coming year and the artists have been picked by 165 UK-based tastemakers.
They each named their favourite three new acts and those with the most votes were put on the list. The top five and winner will be unveiled in January.
The longlist features 15 artists, and aside from dark horse candidates like Rox, a half-Iranian, half-Jamaican soul singer, and Stornoway, whose sound the BBC describes as "bloke-folk," they are predominantly electronic-influenced.
The list's electronic bent is part of a trend that has become impossible to ignore in the last two years. Even though artists like Joy Orbison, a dubstep producer whose single, "Hyph Mngo" is likely to appear on many of this year's Best Dance Tracks lists, and Gold Panda, whose stubbly, contemplative productions recall both Polvo and Flying Lotus, probably won't make the top five, their mere inclusion in a list like this would have been almost unthinkable just a few years ago.
The acts most likely (in our opinion, anyway) to make January's shortlist are still relatively traditional, but they still take significant musical cues from techno and other electronic genres.
Bands like Delphic, seen in the above video, and Two Door Cinema Club, whose biggest single was released on electro-rock label Kisuné, feature stuttering samples and arpeggios; Everything Everything, a Passion Pit-esque band whose music is overstuffed with ideas and hooks, would have a very hard time recreating their music without sequencers.
Our other two picks to make the shortlist feature different sounds, but in terms of their reliance on synths and similar gear, they're no different. HURTS make grand, disco lento-inspired pop similar to artists like Soft Sell, Kano and Tears for Fears, and Frankmusik protégé Ellie Goulding, who could continue this poll's mini-streak of winning female artists (Little Boots and Adele have won the previous two), sings abashed love songs over bright, radio-friendly synths.
Though winning this poll doesn't guarantee artists anything internationally, it does a lot more for an artist than, say, winning the Mercury Prize. And it's probably worth all of the money/payola/outrageously deviant sexual gifts the major labels lavish on the bloggers, radio programmers, and DJs who nominated these artists in the first place.
Feel free to leave your predictions for who you think is going to win in the comments below.