2010 in Music

Hawaii, no sleep, no tweeting A rapper books three rooms in a Honolulu studio and fills them around the clock for months. Engineers work 24-hour shifts. Rules are posted on the walls: no phones, no blogs, no stupid questions. The finished album features a prog-rock guitar sample, a children's choir, a nine-minute piano piece where the artist plays the same note for a full minute before anyone else enters the room. It debuts at number one with 496,000 copies, the same week a debut from a female rapper moves 375,000. The album receives a perfect score from one of the internet's most influential review sites, the first hip-hop record to do so.

A million in a week, one writer A 20-year-old country singer releases her third album with no co-writers. Every lyric, every melody, every bridge is hers alone. It sells 1,047,000 copies in its first week, the first album to cross a million since 2008, and the highest single-week total ever recorded by a female country artist. Nashville's model has always depended on professional songwriters feeding material to performers. This album proves that the performer and the writer can be the same person and still move units at a scale the system was not built to accommodate.

The Muscle Shoals room A two-piece blues-rock band from Akron drives to Sheffield, Alabama, to record in a studio that has been closed for thirty years and converted into a museum. They bring their own gear, set up in the room as-is, and cut ten tracks in ten days. The engineer later recalls that something transcendent happened as soon as they started playing. The album debuts at number three and wins three Grammys. The room, which once hosted sessions that defined Southern soul, turns out to have one more record left in it.

Three albums in one calendar year A Swedish pop singer releases three albums between June and November on her own label. She has been making records for fifteen years, but the industry has never quite known how to sell her: too pop for indie audiences, too strange for pop radio. The strategy is simple and unprecedented: instead of one album with a long promotional cycle, she floods the market. The lead single from the first installment, a song about dancing alone in a club, becomes the year's definitive pop heartbreak anthem without ever cracking the American top forty.

Sade returns, half a million listen After a ten-year silence, a group releases its sixth album and debuts at number one with 502,000 first-week copies, the best opening for any group since late 2008. It stays at number one for three consecutive weeks. The sound has not changed much: the same cool, unhurried vocals over jazz-inflected production, the same refusal to chase trends. The album goes platinum within a month. In a year when the industry is panicking about declining sales, the proof that a loyal audience will show up after a decade of waiting is quietly reassuring.

The drop heard everywhere A former post-hardcore vocalist releases a five-track EP on a Canadian producer's label. The title track builds through a compressed riser into a wobbling bass synth so distorted it barely resembles a musical note. The EP wins two Grammys the following year and introduces a word to mainstream vocabulary: the drop. Dance music in America has been an underground concern for decades. Within months, the same bass-heavy production style is soundtracking beer commercials and halftime shows.

A concept album wins Album of the Year A Montreal band records its third album across bedrooms, basements, churches, and proper studios in four cities. They press each finished song to a 12-inch lacquer disc and then record it back into the digital master, embedding the warmth and imperfection of vinyl into every track. The album is a concept piece about suburban sprawl and childhood nostalgia, sixteen songs long. It debuts at number one in three countries and wins Album of the Year at the Grammys, beating nominees from pop, hip-hop, and country. It is the first album on an independent label to win the award.

The chillwave summer A loosely connected group of bedroom producers, mostly in their twenties, release debut albums built on the same palette: cheap synthesizers, warped samples, drum machines buried under reverb, vocals so processed they sound submerged. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both run features trying to name the movement. The name that sticks, chillwave, is coined half-ironically on a blog. The music sounds like VHS tapes melting in the sun, nostalgia for a decade these producers were too young to remember.

Banjos replaced by drum machines A folk singer who built his reputation on acoustic instruments and orchestral arrangements releases an album that abandons nearly everything his audience expects. Banjos and guitars give way to analog synthesizers, glitchy soundscapes, filtered vocals, and hip-hop drum patterns. The album runs 75 minutes, inspired by the apocalyptic paintings of an outsider artist. It peaks at number seven, his highest chart position ever. The transformation is so complete that fans at early tour dates stand in confused silence before the new material wins them over.

An Afrofuturist debut A singer from Kansas City releases her debut album as suites two and three of an ongoing science-fiction concept. The music fuses funk, rock, new wave, and classical orchestration into something that does not fit any radio format. One single pairs her with one half of a Southern rap duo for a track about walking a tightrope. The album scores 91 on Metacritic, one of the highest ratings of the year in any genre, and earns a Grammy nomination, but radio play remains minimal. The concept is too elaborate, the genre-blending too restless, the ambition too large for a debut.

Vinyl crosses two million LP sales in the United States reach approximately 2.8 million units, more than doubling since 2006. Revenue hits 89 million dollars, a level not seen in twenty years. Major retailers begin stocking records again. Record Store Day, founded three years earlier, is drawing lines around the block. The format that the CD was supposed to kill is now the fastest-growing segment of the physical music market. Streaming, meanwhile, accounts for just seven percent of US music revenue. The digital-physical crossover is still a year away.