2007 in Music

Name your price On October 10, a band posts its seventh album on its own website with no label, no distributor, and a blank price field. Buyers type in whatever they want to pay, from zero to ninety-nine pounds. Thirty-eight percent of downloaders pay something. The band makes three million dollars before the physical version ships, more than it earned from its previous album's entire run. The experiment does not destroy the music industry or save it. It does something stranger: it proves that an established act can walk away from the label system entirely and come out ahead.

September 11, two registers Two rappers release albums on the same day, September 11, after one of them publicly promises to retire if he is outsold. The challenger moves 957,000 copies in his first week. The incumbent moves 691,000. It is the first time since 1991 that two artists each push over 600,000 units in the same seven days. The result is read as a verdict: the challenger's album samples French house music and wears a Takashi Murakami cover; the incumbent's album leans on the street credibility that defined the previous decade. Conscious, weird, pop-facing hip-hop has just outsold gangsta rap in a head-to-head race, and neither side pretends it does not matter.

The last anthem from the underground A Houston duo releases its fifth album in August, a double disc with twenty-six tracks and a guest list that reads like a summit of Southern rap. One single, built on a Willie Hutch sample and an OutKast feature, becomes the song of the summer in every region simultaneously. Four months later, one half of the duo is found dead in a West Hollywood hotel room at thirty-three. The coroner rules it accidental: promethazine-codeine syrup compounded by sleep apnea. The album had debuted at number one. The single keeps playing through the winter, and nobody can hear it the same way.

All my friends A producer who spent years running a New York dance label releases his second album in March. One track builds for seven minutes on a single repeated piano figure, adding layers of synthesizer and drums until the whole structure is surging forward, a song about aging and friendship and parties ending that sounds like it never wants to stop. The album debuts at number forty-six. Within two years, that piano figure is one of the most recognized refrains in independent music, played at weddings and funerals and closing-time playlists by people who have never heard of the label it came out on.

Rain and concrete An anonymous London producer releases his second album in November on a small label run out of a flat in South London. The music is built entirely in a free audio editor, no sequencer, no drum machine, vinyl crackle and pitch-shifted R&B vocals layered over 140 BPM garage rhythms and sub-bass so low it feels more like weather than sound. A music magazine later calls it the most important electronic album of the century so far. The producer's identity remains secret for years. The album arrives at the exact moment when dubstep, still confined to a handful of South London club nights, begins to leak into the broader culture.

A cabin in Wisconsin A singer from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, moves into his father's hunting cabin for three months over the winter, alone with a few microphones and aging equipment. He records for twelve hours a day, breaks to saw firewood or sit in a deer stand at sunrise, and stacks his falsetto into layered harmonies that sound like a choir of one person singing to no one. The finished album is self-released in July on a tiny run of CDs. It will not reach most listeners until its wide release the following February, but the mythology is already forming: the cabin, the solitude, the broken heart, the snow.

Opera-disco from Paris A French duo releases its debut album in June, built from roughly four hundred sampled records, compressed and distorted until the sources are unrecognizable. The breakout single is a tribute to Michael Jackson that sounds nothing like him: crunchy synthesizers, pounding kick drums, a children's choir spelling out a word over electro-house production. The album reaches number one on dance charts in both the US and UK. That same summer, another French duo performs inside a custom LED pyramid at festivals worldwide, mashing up its own catalog into a continuous set that wins a Grammy and redefines what a live electronic show can look like.

Forty-eight tracks from a sampler in Lisbon A member of an experimental collective, living alone in Lisbon, records his third solo album using a portable sampler and layers of manipulated vocal loops. The result sounds like a Beach Boys album transmitted through a shortwave radio from another decade: warm, dubby, psychedelic, built from dozens of sources dissolved into texture. The album does not chart, but it reshapes how a generation of musicians thinks about sampling, treating the sampler not as a quoting device but as an instrument that generates new sound from old.

The iPhone and the iPod nano On June 29, a company that already dominates digital music sales releases a phone that absorbs the iPod into a touchscreen device. The standalone music player begins its slow disappearance. Three months later, the same company airs a television commercial for the new iPod nano featuring a Canadian singer-songwriter counting to four. Her album jumps from six thousand copies a week to the best-selling record on the iTunes Store. Apple is now simultaneously the world's largest music retailer and its most powerful promotional platform, and a thirty-second ad can do what a year of radio play used to.

Ten weeks of rain A singer from Barbados, three albums into a career that has been successful but not yet defining, releases a single featuring a guest verse from a retired rapper. It debuts with the biggest first-week digital sales in the history of the iTunes Store and spends ten consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the longest run of the twenty-first century to that point. The song is built on a simple synthesizer hook and a four-word chorus that turns into a playground chant within weeks. The album it comes from marks a deliberate shift: Caribbean pop replaced by darker, harder production, a new image, a new silhouette.

A sixteen-year-old and a forty-year tradition A teenager from Pennsylvania releases her debut album in late 2006, and by 2007 it has spent twenty-four weeks at number one on the country chart, the longest run by any album in the format in years. She is the first female country artist to write or co-write every song on a platinum debut. Two singles reach number one on the country charts. At seventeen, she wins the Country Music Association's Horizon Award. Nashville has been making records for forty years with hired songwriters and session players; nobody quite knows what to do with a kid who arrived with her own songs already finished.