2005 in Music

Two million dollars and a film composer A rapper who won Best Rap Album in February spends more than a year and roughly two million dollars recording his second album with a Hollywood film composer known for scoring dramas about loneliness and addiction. The sessions fill studios in New York and Los Angeles with a twenty-piece orchestra, celesta, harpsichord, Chinese bells, and a berimbau. The album debuts at number one with 860,000 first-week copies. Its lead single, built on a sped-up Ray Charles sample, holds the top of the Hot 100 for ten consecutive weeks and sets the record for most digital downloads in a single week.

The Glitter redemption A singer whose career had been declared dead after a film soundtrack debacle and a public breakdown four years earlier releases her tenth album in April. It debuts at number one and becomes the best-selling album of the year in the United States, moving nearly five million copies by December. The lead single spends fourteen weeks at number one on the Hot 100, the longest reign of 2005. A second single also reaches number one. At the following year's Grammys, she wins her first award since 1991.

Fifty states, starting with the third A songwriter announces he will write an album for all fifty states. His second entry in the project, focused on Illinois, arrives in July with liner notes longer than some novels and arrangements built for a twenty-piece ensemble: strings, brass, woodwinds, banjo, oboe, and choir. It becomes the best-reviewed album of the year, the first record on its tiny independent label to chart on the Billboard 200, and proof that an artist with no major-label support, no radio play, and no conventional marketing can make something that critics and listeners treat as the most important record of the year.

George Bush doesn't care about black people Hurricane Katrina devastates the Gulf Coast on August 29, and a benefit concert airs on NBC four days later. Standing next to a visibly stunned comedian during a live broadcast reaching 8.5 million viewers, a rapper goes off-script and delivers nine words that NBC scrambles to cut away from. The President later calls the moment the lowest point of his presidency. New Orleans musicians rally relief efforts as the city that invented jazz sits underwater.

Eighteen seconds at the zoo Three former employees of an online payment company register a domain name on Valentine's Day and upload the first video to their new platform in April: eighteen seconds of a man standing in front of elephants at a zoo. By November it launches publicly. Within eighteen months it will be acquired for 1.65 billion dollars and will have permanently altered how music is discovered, shared, promoted, and consumed. The clip is not much to look at. It changes everything.

Twenty years later, the same stage On a Saturday in July, ten simultaneous concerts across G8 nations mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1985 benefit that broadcast from London and Philadelphia. In Hyde Park, four members of a band that has not shared a stage since 1981 play together for twenty-three minutes. The bassist had to ask the concert's organizer for the guitarist's phone number. Three days of rehearsals in a West London studio precede the performance. It is the last time all four will play together; the keyboardist dies three years later.

A band with no label, no publicist, and no radio A Brooklyn band records its debut album for under five thousand dollars, presses copies, and hand-delivers them to record stores in New York and Philadelphia. A music website gives it a 9.0 rating. MP3 blogs circulate the tracks. David Bowie and David Byrne start showing up at shows. The album sells over 125,000 copies with no label, no publicist, no manager, and no radio play. It becomes the template for the blog-to-fame pipeline and proof that the old gatekeepers are no longer required.

The number-one debut from Sheffield A band from a Sheffield pub circuit has its demos uploaded to a social networking site by fans without the band's involvement. The songs spread through forums and file-sharing before the band has a record deal. When the debut single arrives in October, it goes straight to number one in the UK. The social network that launched them has 36 million users and has just been purchased for 580 million dollars. A new geography of music discovery is being mapped in real time, and the A&R department is the last to know.

Five acts, five number ones, one calendar year An Armenian-American metal band becomes only the fifth act in history to debut two studio albums at number one on the Billboard 200 in the same calendar year. The two records are halves of a single double album released six months apart, political lyrics about the Iraq War and the Armenian Genocide riding over thrash riffs, operatic vocal shifts, and time signatures that change every few bars. One single wins a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. The band goes on hiatus the following year.

The last beats from the hospital bed A producer in Detroit contributes beats to a Chicago rapper's album while battling a rare blood disease that has been thinning his blood for years. The resulting record, built primarily by the rapper's frequent collaborator but grounded by the ill producer's rhythmic sensibility, debuts at number two and earns four Grammy nominations. The producer's work on the album is among his final studio contributions. He dies the following February at thirty-two.

Dancehall, baile funk, and a civil war A London-born Sri Lankan Tamil artist releases her debut album, named after her activist father. Built with a Philadelphia DJ and an ex-Elastica guitarist, it smashes together dancehall, baile funk, electroclash, and punk into something that sounds like a political rally at a dance party. It peaks at number 190 on the Billboard 200 and sells modestly, but its influence moves sideways through culture, redrawing the map of what pop music can borrow and from where.