2016 in Music

A parting gift, two days early A singer releases his twenty-fifth album on his sixty-ninth birthday, January 8. It is built around a jazz quintet recruited on the recommendation of a composer known for orchestral improvisation. The saxophone player and his bandmates signed confidentiality agreements before the sessions began. The musicians were encouraged to experiment but given fully demoed tracks as blueprints. Two days after release, the singer dies of liver cancer he had kept secret from the public. The album's opening track runs nearly ten minutes, its rhythms borrowed from Kendrick Lamar's recent work, its structure closer to free jazz than anything on rock radio.

An hour on HBO On April 23, an hour-long film premieres on cable television. It is also an album: twelve tracks moving through rage, denial, forgiveness, and redemption, structured around the poetry of a twenty-seven-year-old Somali-British writer. The music touches every American genre in sequence, from field recordings made by folklorists in the early twentieth century to trap production to psychedelic rock to country. One track features a duet recorded on a porch with an electric guitar fed through a hollow-body amplifier. The performance at the Super Bowl two months earlier had already set the terms: dancers in formation, a sinking police car, the words stop shooting us visible on a wall.

Twenty thousand people hear an unfinished album On February 11, a rapper premieres his seventh album for twenty thousand people at Madison Square Garden during a fashion show. Songs do not have drums until the morning of the event. After release, he continues changing mixes, updating the tracklist, adding entire songs to the streaming version. It is the first album to reach number one on the Billboard 200 primarily through streams. He calls it a living work. When the platform holding the exclusive cannot handle demand, the album is pirated half a million times in days.

Two albums in two days On August 19, a singer releases a visual album of him building a staircase in a warehouse, forty-five minutes of R&B drifting over footage of sawing and sanding. It fulfills his contract with a major label. The next day, he independently releases a different album entirely: spare, detuned, built on whispered vocals and synthesizers that hover just below pitch. Pop-up shops in four cities give away a magazine containing the CD, photography, a screenplay, and a poem about fast food. The independent release earns an estimated one million dollars in profit within a week.

A choir changes the rules A rapper from Chicago releases a mixtape exclusively on a streaming service. Gospel choirs form the backbone of the production, not as decoration but as the primary instrument, surging behind verses the way soul samples once anchored an earlier generation of hip-hop. A legendary gospel artist appears alongside a children's choir from the rapper's hometown. The project becomes the first streaming-only release to win a Grammy, and the Recording Academy changes its eligibility rules in response, opening the door for any album released without a physical format.

Dancehall at a billion A Toronto rapper releases his fourth album after two years of work with more than seventy collaborators. One single, built on a dancehall rhythm with a vocal hook borrowed from a UK singer's existing track, sits at number one for ten weeks. On December 12, it becomes the first song in history to reach one billion streams on a single platform. The album moves 852,000 copies in its first week, 653,000 of them counted through streaming equivalents. Paid streaming subscriptions surpass CD revenue for the first time this year.

A sugarcane field in Louisiana A singer spends three years writing and recording her third album, beginning in New Orleans and finishing in a small house surrounded by sugarcane in New Iberia, Louisiana, with only her engineers for company. The production is built around live instrumentation, warm and unhurried, arranged by a producer who came up through the Bay Area soul scene. The album debuts at number one. It becomes the consensus pick for album of the year across critics' polls, landing at the top of multiple publications' lists.

Frozen still to Black Beatles On October 26, students at a Florida high school post a video of themselves standing perfectly still while a camera weaves through the room. The format, people frozen in place while music plays, goes viral within days. The song everyone uses is a trap single by a duo from Tupelo, Mississippi. The track had already been climbing the charts, but the meme rockets it to number one, dethroning a pop-EDM ballad that had held the spot for twelve weeks. It is the year's clearest case of a song becoming a hit because the internet decided it was the soundtrack to a gesture.

The last record in the living room An eighty-two-year-old songwriter records his fourteenth album in his living room in Los Angeles because he can barely leave his chair. The setup is a single vintage condenser microphone, a laptop running recording software, and speakers on the dining room table. His son produces, keeping arrangements minimal, building songs around the choir from the synagogue where the songwriter grew up in Montreal. The album is released on October 21. Seventeen days later, the songwriter dies. It is the third farewell album released in 2016, following records in January and April by artists who also did not survive the year.

Funk from the future, drums from the past An actor and rapper releases his third album in December, and there is almost no rapping on it. His producer spends weeks building a custom drum room in the artist's house to get the exact low-end thump of early 1970s funk records. The album channels clavinet, wah-wah guitar, and falsetto vocals directly from the source, not through samples but through live performance of the style. One track, built on a pillowy bassline and layered harmonies, becomes the breakout single, nominated for Record of the Year and eventually ubiquitous as a meme soundtrack of its own.

Three times a week on dialysis A rapper who has been receiving dialysis three times a week in Oakland flies to New Jersey to record with his group for the first time in eighteen years. He stays in a hotel near his bandmate's home. The sessions are conducted in secrecy after a late-night television appearance convinces the group to reconvene. The rapper dies on March 22 at age forty-five. His bandmate finishes the album alone. It is the group's sixth and final record. The title is chosen by the rapper who did not live to hear the finished version.

Tape and strings in three countries A band records its ninth album across studios in London, Oxford, and the south of France. The producer insists on analog tape with no computers: if a take needs to be replaced, the previous one is erased. The guitarist arranges all the string and choral parts, performed by a contemporary orchestra. On the day the strings are recorded for the opening track, the producer's father, himself a string player, dies. The producer goes to the session anyway. The band had erased its entire internet presence days before releasing the album, leaving only blank white pages where a website and social media accounts had been.