2017 in Music

Sixteen weeks in Spanish A Puerto Rican singer writes ninety percent of a song in under two hours at his Miami home. The word that becomes the title comes to him one morning. A pair of Colombian producers build the track. A Canadian pop star hears it in a nightclub during a South American tour and records an English-language verse in six days on a Caribbean island. The remix tops the Hot 100 for sixteen weeks, tying the all-time record. It is the first primarily Spanish-language number one since 1996.

Second woman to the top, solo A former reality television personality from the Bronx releases her major-label debut single in June, built on a cadence borrowed from an Atlanta rapper's viral track. The song climbs from number 85 to number one in three months, knocking the year's biggest pop comeback off the top spot. She becomes the second female rapper to reach number one solo, nineteen years after the first. The single generates a 217 percent spike in search traffic for a French luxury shoe brand mentioned in the hook.

Two number ones in two weeks A rapper from Atlanta releases two albums in consecutive weeks in February. Both debut at number one on the Billboard 200, a feat no artist has managed in the streaming era. The first record is hard, cold, built on cavernous 808 patterns from a tight circle of producers. The second is softer, layered with singing and warped vocal textures. Together they prove that in a world of instant release, an artist can flood the zone and still find an audience for both versions of himself.

The Pulitzer goes to Compton An album released in April is structured as a series of interconnected tracks that can be played in either direction. Producers camp out in a Santa Monica studio for months, building beats from jazz samples, soul loops, and original compositions featuring strings recorded at a historic Hollywood scoring stage. The album debuts at number one and wins Best Rap Album at the Grammys. The following spring, it becomes the first hip-hop record, and the first work outside classical and jazz, to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

A teenager's prom song goes platinum Weeks before his high school prom in El Paso, Texas, an eighteen-year-old uploads a song to the internet. It catches fire. Within a year he has a debut album recorded across studios in four cities and two continents, a voice described less as R&B than as the ambient temperature of being young in the American Southwest. The record goes platinum by October and earns a Grammy nomination. He is still a teenager.

The room where country lives A singer-songwriter records two volumes of an album at a Nashville studio so tied to the genre's history that he names both records after it. The producer, the same one behind the year's best Americana album from another artist, keeps the sessions spare: acoustic guitar, pedal steel, voice, minimal overdubs. Volume one wins Album of the Year at the CMA Awards and Best Country Album at the Grammys. In a year when pop-country dominates radio, the most decorated country record sounds like it was made in 1972.

The heartbreak album as house party A twenty-year-old from New Zealand writes her second album about her first real breakup, structuring the songs around a single night at a party. Her main collaborator records her in a Brooklyn home studio and at a handful of rooms in New York and Los Angeles over eighteen months. The finished record layers piano, processed drums, and pop hooks into something that sounds enormous and lonely at the same time. It debuts at number one. Critics call it the best pop album of the year.

Hip-hop passes rock For the first time in the history of tracked consumption data, R&B and hip-hop become the largest genre in the United States, claiming 24.5 percent of all consumption units and overtaking rock. The shift is driven almost entirely by streaming: 618 billion on-demand streams for the year, up from 432 billion the year before. Twenty-five hip-hop songs land in the year-end Hot 100, a record. The entire year-end top ten is male artists, the first time that has happened since 1984.

SoundCloud summer A loosely connected wave of young rappers, most of them still teenagers, upload tracks mixed with deliberate roughness: distorted bass, clipping vocals, beats built on free software. One rapper's song about designer fashion becomes inescapable despite sounding like it was recorded inside a washing machine. Another releases an album of emo ballads produced by bedroom artists he found online. A self-described boy band of rappers releases two full albums in three months from a house in Los Angeles. None of them need a label to find millions of listeners.

The flower album A rapper known for abrasive solo records and running a collective out of his Los Angeles home makes a sharp turn. His fifth album is lush with jazz chords, neo-soul harmonies, and guest vocalists who get more space than he does. He keeps his own verses short, letting the instrumentation breathe: layered keyboards, warm bass, strings. Flowers recur as a motif throughout. The album debuts at number two and earns a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album.

Three losses, five months In May, a vocalist collapses after a concert in Detroit. In July, a singer is found dead on what would have been his close friend's birthday, two months after releasing an album that critics had dismissed as a departure. In October, a guitarist dies at sixty-six after what is initially reported as a heart attack. The three deaths, spanning May to October, remove voices from three generations of American rock. They rank as the top three losses in the year's most-searched Google queries.

One love, fifty-five thousand Two weeks after a bombing kills twenty-two people leaving a pop concert in Manchester, the headlining artist organizes a benefit at a cricket ground across the city. Forty-thousand-pound tickets sell out in twenty minutes. Fourteen thousand survivors from the original show receive free admission. The broadcast draws 22.6 million viewers, making it the most-watched television event of the year in the UK. The concert raises ten million pounds in twelve hours.