We’ve long said goodbye to the days of rock and roll records, VH1 music videos and glossy music magazines as we’ve listened to music abrasively cross over into the digital space over the past decade. Print magazines like Rolling Stone, SPIN and Relix have struggled to transition to the web, in heated competition with the likes of Pitchfork, (est. 1995), which is devoted to sharp music criticism and news and Stereogum (est. 2002), which was one of the world’s first successful MP3 blogs.

In early 2011, David Wade, a serial entrepreneur started Popdust with Editor Craig Marks of Billboard, Spin and Blender fame, to be the premiere pop music online destination, much like Pitchfork and Stereogum are for the indie music scene. Wade has been in the online music space since working at Imeem, a social media web site for streaming, uploading and sharing music. After Imeem was sold to MySpace in 2009, Wade focused his efforts on this accelerating space. “Pop music news hasn’t found a home in the digital landscape. MTV cares more about TV than M (music), as its core content mission is long form reality TV. And as Justin Bieber dictates 3% of Twitter’s servers, pop music is clearly a space that shouldn’t be ignored,” explains Wade.

Popdust is a startup of NYC based Gramercy Labs, including companies Snooth and Lot18. Each Gramercy Labs startup is built on a specific formula for success: essentially take a viable, profitable concept + hire someone with incredible business savvy (Wade) + pair with a creative, celebrity force (Marks) to establish a brand + build scalability through software.

Popdust focuses a critical, humorous lens on the pop music genre, which Wade defines pop music as the 100 or so most consumed artists (think Lady Gaga, Kitty Purry, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Drake and Little Wayne) but says pop music critique has never been taken less seriously by real music journalists. Popdust offers opinion-driven features on bigger moments relevant to pop music like the Grammys, American Idol, or even the Rebecca Black phenomenon; rates new singles and collaborations daily; and produces multiple photo caption posts per day, as well as slideshows of event coverage and artist biopics.

The site leans heavily on artist participation through exclusives like their recent world premiere with Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy. Due to industry veteran Craig Marks’ golden Rolodex, Popdust will be brewing in rich content for years to come. The site also relies on non-traditional formats to engage readers like Magic Box, its hilarious interview series which relies on unusual, often left field reader submitted questions. For example, watch this one below in which “rock-chicklet” Taylor Momsen drops the C-word.

On May 1st, Popdust will release a social feature called “Friends with Benefits” as a way to encourage people to contribute and share content through incentives such as access to artists and products from their advertising partners. Popdust is currently running ads from the MOG Music network, to maintain a premium, clean environment. This summer, Popdust will produce a mobile and tablet app to leverage its music, photo and video content.

In the past 30 days, Popdust has garnered more than 1.2 million total views and partnered with AOL, Huffington Post, MTV, CNN, Gawker, CBS Radio, Allhiphop, Grammy.com, MSN Wonderwall and Vibe. So far the Gramercy Labs startup has raised $1 million in Series A funding from SoftBank, RRE, Raptor Group, Lerer Media Ventures and other angel investors.

Want to find out more about Kitty Purry, the girls behind Glee or why Justin Bieber was named one of the world’s most influential people? Tune into Popdust.

I was reading about the making of Brian Eno’s “Another Green World” earlier I found myself wondering whether it would be possible to record and release such an ambitious album in these times, where record labels are acting like frightened animals, cautiously guarding their IP and making easy moves – no doubt fearful of any further financial hemorrhaging.

Another Green World was made in 1975 in a top London studio that Eno, following a stint in Roxy Music and two well received solo albums, had booked – along with a group of the top musicians of time – without actually having planned much out first. This kind of thing went on a lot in the seventies, where after two decades of lucrative rock ‘n’ roll the money was there to make anything possible and confidence in artists (and not just their managers) was at a peak.

It’s a widely held view that we’re living in a kind of polar opposite to this these days and that the web, with its core principles of openness providing an easy sea for music pirates to sail on, is somehow to blame for this. It doesn’t stop there either – social media advocates that have tried to introduce the need for interaction with audiences to musicians, managers and labels have recently been met with waves of negativity and a sad yearning for “the good old days” when all that was needed to sell thousands of records was a few interviews and some decent radio coverage.

As you’d expect from massive corporate entities, major labels themselves have always been slow to embrace technology and therefore often highly suspicious of it – for instance the delays that have beset the launch of Spotify in the US have apparently been caused by a lack of confidence in potential revenues for the service. This is despite its success in Europe and the fact that these labels own forays into selling music via the web have been massive failures – not to mention the current alternative of continuing to release music only for it to be sold once and then endlessly pirated.

This might be a good time then, if they want to actually be around in ten years time, for labels to begin investing in emerging music technology themselves – rather than be at the mercy of smarter, web-savvy companies that will control their future interaction with audiences, and perhaps even one day seek to usurp them. A wise place to start would be to look into future formats, since MP3 is unlikely to be around forever and has proven to be a medium which suits audiences far, far more than it does the labels. Also, with licensing and IP issues no doubt being a major headache for them in terms of time and resources, perhaps harnessing technology as a means of dealing with these would be wise – although I can see a few people in the legal system resisting this one.

A forward thinking view with regards to the data around their music and artists would benefit them too. You only have to look at LastFm, whose API provides artist and song data to range of popular sites or The Echo Nest, which has recently struck deals around their music data services with two broadcasting giants in the form of BBC and MTV to see that this has a real value in terms of the kind of mobile apps and web services they can provide their audiences in the future.This is certainly something worth thinking about if these begin to replace traditional formats like singles and albums as a means of experiencing music, something that some are starting to believe is very likely. Bearing in mind that this new type of media might allow labels the chance to once again exert some control over the way audiences purchase and interact with music it would be unwise to ignore this trend in the way they ignored the rise of the mp3 fifteen years ago.

As much as I can see that record labels have been overly defensive and almost comically foolish when it comes to the Internet, few things would bring me greater pleasure than to see them recover the confidence to allow them to start investing in artists again and I honestly believe that it’s technology that holds the key to this. Let’s hope we start to see this in the coming years – who knows, maybe one day soon we might get to hear a musical endeavor as glorious as “Another Green World”.