2013 in Music

Fifteen days to cut it in half A rapper arrives at a producer's Malibu studio with a rough cut that runs nearly three and a half hours. The producer has fifteen days before the release date. They work fifteen hours a day, no days off. Five songs still need vocals with two days left. Two or three still need lyrics. The final album is ten tracks, forty minutes, less than twenty percent of what walked through the door. It ships with no album art on the packaging, just a strip of red tape. It sounds like nothing else in mainstream hip-hop: acid house, industrial screech, Chicago drill, stripped to the studs.

The most expensive live record in years A French electronic duo spends four years in studios across Hollywood, New York, and Paris, deliberately abandoning the tools that made them famous. No laptops, no software. Instead: live session musicians, vintage vocoders, a custom-built modular synthesizer, and a guitarist whose pulsing disco riff was recorded at the same studio where he cut his own band's debut in 1977. The finished album costs over a million dollars and becomes the best-selling vinyl of the year at 49,000 copies on wax alone. It wins Album of the Year at the Grammys.

Midnight on a Friday, no warning In December, a singer drops her fifth album on iTunes at midnight with no prior announcement, no singles, no promotional campaign. Every track has its own music video. Over two hundred people kept the secret, all under nondisclosure agreements. It sells 828,000 copies in three days, the fastest-selling album in the store's history. The strategy rewrites the album rollout permanently. Within two years, surprise drops become a standard tactic for major artists across every genre.

Twenty-two years of silence, then a crashed website A band that has not released an album since 1991 self-publishes its third record on a Saturday night through its own relaunched website. The site crashes within minutes from traffic. Three days earlier, at a warmup show in south London, the frontman told the audience it might be out in two or three days. No label, no distributor, no advance press. The album is available as a download, a CD, or a 180-gram LP. Critics treat it like an archaeological event.

A ghost returns on his birthday On January 8, his sixty-sixth birthday, a singer who has not been heard from in a decade releases a single and announces a new album. He recorded it in secret in New York over eighteen months, co-producing with his longtime collaborator, never working more than two or three weeks at a time before taking two-month breaks. Everyone involved signed nondisclosure agreements. The cover art is a defaced version of his most famous album sleeve, a white square pasted over his own face. It is widely received as his strongest work in thirty years.

A meme goes to number one On January 30, a YouTube comedian uploads a fifteen-second video of himself dancing alone in a helmet, then cutting to a room of people thrashing. The song underneath is a trap-influenced instrumental by a Brooklyn producer. Within forty days, imitation videos accumulate one billion YouTube views, averaging twenty million a day at the peak. The instrumental debuts at number one on the Hot 100. The phenomenon directly accelerates Billboard's decision to incorporate YouTube streaming data into the chart formula for the first time, effective March 2013.

Sixteen and dry as bone A sixteen-year-old from Auckland writes a song in half an hour at her parents' house during a school break, then records it at a small studio in the suburbs with a producer who plays all the instruments himself. The beat is sparse: a kick, a snare, a low bass tone, almost nothing else. Her voice sits close and unprocessed in a landscape of negative space. The song becomes the first by a solo artist under seventeen to top the Hot 100 since 1988. It wins Song of the Year at the Grammys, an anti-materialism anthem arriving in a year dominated by excess.

The thrift shop and the precedent A Seattle rapper's novelty single about secondhand clothing, released independently with no major-label backing, becomes the year-end number-one song in America with over seven million copies sold. It is the first independent track to top the Hot 100 since 1994. Meanwhile, the year's longest-running number one, a retro-soul groove produced by the same hitmaker behind the French duo's comeback, spends twelve weeks on top before a copyright lawsuit changes the music industry. A jury later rules that its groove infringes a 1977 soul record, establishing the precedent that feel, not just melody, can be owned.

Brothers from Surrey Two brothers from a commuter town south of London fuse nineties UK garage rhythms with deep house bass lines and soulful guest vocals, including a then-unknown singer whose feature becomes a breakout hit. The older brother enlisted the younger when he turned eighteen and could finally get into clubs. Their debut album tops the UK chart and lands a Grammy nomination. It is pop-oriented dance music that does not need the drop, content to groove at a human tempo while the rest of the electronic world chases bigger explosions.

Two weeks in the hills, mostly on shrooms Two rappers, one from Brooklyn and one from Atlanta, book an isolated studio in upstate New York for two weeks in April. They smoke, take mushrooms, drink, and record roughly seventy percent of their debut album together. The name comes from a lyric on an old hip-hop record. They release it as a free download in June. The partnership, born from a mutual admiration that began when one produced the other's previous solo record, becomes one of the decade's most reliable acts.

Samsung buys a million copies A rapper announces his twelfth album during a three-minute ad that airs during the NBA Finals. A phone manufacturer pays five million dollars to give away one million digital copies to its customers seventy-two hours before the album's general release. The move is unprecedented: a brand deal as distribution strategy. The instant million-unit shipment forces the Recording Industry Association of America to revise its certification rules, shortening the waiting period that had been in place for decades. Within two years, exclusive platform releases become routine.