Remember the noughties? It was a pop landscape dominated by the earnest singer-songwriting male. A time when James Blunt could soundtrack our lives – whether we liked it or not – with You're Beautiful, and the likes of David Gray and James Morrison helped him make the charts a masculine, if somewhat fey, place.
Those days are gone. Gray has all but given up, Morrison couldn't sell an album to his mum and Blunt's records are even scorned by Radio 2. Fifteen years after the Spice Girls declared the arrival of Girl Power, female chart hegemony is complete.
It's all Adele's fault really - every household has at least three copies of 21, and in her wake we've seen Brit ladies like Jessie J, Pixie Lott and Ellie Goulding eat up the Top 10. It's the same away from the straight pop, with the Radio 2 playlist falling under Rumer's spell. And for the fifth year in a row, the BRITs committee gave its Critics' Choice gong to a female singer, Emeli Sandé following wins for Adele, Goulding, Jessie J and Florence + The Machine.
The only boy in town is Ed Sheeran, the exception that proves the rule. So what's gone wrong for the lads? It seems no record company is prepared to put its weight behind a male singer – Sheeran did it pretty much on his tod after all – and the public prefers its male singers bundled in with three or four other pretty boys. Strong women and revitalised boybands have run the soppy troubadours out of town.
