2009 in Music

A guitar walks out the door A psychedelic collective begins writing its eighth album as a trio after one member steps away for personal reasons. The constraint forces the remaining three to abandon guitar entirely and build everything from samplers, synthesizers, and a harmonizer pedal that splits a single voice into pitched-up and pitched-down copies layered back together. The result is their most accessible record, built on rolling basslines and chanted vocals that sound like a summer block party transmitted from inside a dream. It debuts in January and becomes the most critically acclaimed album of the year.

The garage at night Three teenagers in London record their debut in a small garage studio, mostly after dark, building beats on a laptop and mixing to preserve the unpolished intimacy of their demos. The finished album is almost aggressively quiet: sparse guitar, whispered boy-girl vocals trading lines like a conversation you are overhearing through a wall, drum machines so subdued they function as texture rather than rhythm. In a year dominated by maximalist pop, it becomes one of the most praised records of the decade.

Death of Auto-Tune A rapper releases a single on June 23 declaring pitch correction dead, rapping over live drums and hard piano chords, the production deliberately analog and un-processed. The irony is thick: the song was suggested by the very producer who, seven months earlier, released the decade's most prominent pitch-corrected album. The single wins a Grammy. Auto-Tune use only accelerates.

A mixtape and a new pipeline A twenty-two-year-old actor from Toronto uploads a free mixtape to a blog on February 13. Two tracks become radio singles. One reaches number two on the Hot 100. Within months, every major label is bidding. The old pathway, demo tape to A&R meeting to record deal to album to tour, collapses into a single zip file on the internet. The mixtape peaks at number five on the Billboard 200 before it is even officially released.

Twenty-six weeks at number one Two singles from the same group occupy the top two positions on the Hot 100 simultaneously for four weeks in the summer. The first holds number one for twelve weeks, the second replaces it and stays for fourteen. Combined: twenty-six consecutive weeks at number one, a record. Both tracks are built on distorted synthesizer hooks, vocoder vocals, and four-on-the-floor kicks pushed through limiters until the waveform is a solid rectangle. Pop music has never been louder.

A joke becomes a genre In July, a satirical blogger coins a word to mock the proliferation of indie microgenres and the bands whose music sounds like incidental audio from 1980s VHS tapes: hazy synths, buried vocals, lo-fi tape warmth, nostalgic melancholy. The joke sticks. Within weeks, music publications use the term without irony. Three bedroom producers, none of whom asked to be grouped together, become its public faces. The genre's name, invented to ridicule it, outlasts the blog that created it.

The internet crashes On June 25, a pop star dies at fifty from an accidental overdose of a surgical anesthetic administered by his personal physician. Global web traffic spikes between eleven and twenty percent. Google suspects a cyberattack. Twitter, Wikipedia, and AOL Instant Messenger slow to a crawl. In the months that follow, the artist's catalog sells thirty-five million copies worldwide, more than any living musician moves all year. MTV temporarily returns to airing music videos.

A guitar swung like an axe On August 28, backstage at a Paris festival, one brother enters the dressing room and swings a guitar at the other's head. The second brother quits before the headlining set, posting a statement that reads in part: with some sadness and great relief. Fifteen years and seven albums end in a single swing. The remaining members form a new band within months.

09/09/09 On September 9, a remastered catalog of the most commercially successful band in history arrives in both stereo and mono box sets alongside a branded video game featuring forty-five of their songs. It is the most elaborate CD release event of the year, a lavish celebration of a physical format that is actively dying. The box sets sell millions. The game wins three Grammys.

Fourteen hours of tape for ten songs A French band decamps to a producer's studio in Montmartre for a year and a half, the first time they have ever worked with an outside collaborator. The producer, one half of a French house duo, has a room full of vintage gear and a perfectionist streak that matches theirs. They record fourteen hours of material and whittle it to ten tracks of pristine, propulsive pop-rock. The album wins a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.

Five weeks, eight million copies A forty-eight-year-old unemployed woman from a small town in Scotland auditions on a televised talent show in April, singing a show tune. The clip reaches a hundred million views online. Her debut album, released in November, sells 8.3 million copies in five weeks, making her the best-selling recording artist in the world for 2009. She has never had a record deal, a manager, or a producer before the audition tape goes viral.