2021 in Music

A living room in Los Angeles A rapper records most of his seventh album in his own living room during the pandemic, self-producing every track. He recruits a mixtape DJ famous for shouting over Southern rap tapes in the 2000s, turning the entire record into a tribute to a format most of his younger fans have never heard. The DJ's ad-libs and intros transform the album into something that feels like a lost artifact discovered in a crate. It wins Best Rap Album at the Grammys.

The stadium sessions Unsatisfied with the state of his tenth album, a producer moves into an Atlanta football stadium in July, converting a locker room into a recording studio. He reportedly pays a million dollars a day for the residency. He holds three successive listening parties in two different stadiums, each more elaborate than the last, reworking the album after each one based on audience reaction and online reviews. The finished record arrives in August with twenty-seven tracks and dozens of contributors.

A teenager's debut breaks streaming records An eighteen-year-old Disney actress releases a single in January about getting a driver's license. It tops the Hot 100 for eight consecutive weeks and becomes the most-streamed song on Spotify in 2021. Her debut album, co-written and produced entirely with one collaborator in a Los Angeles studio, alternates between soft piano ballads and pop-punk outbursts with distorted guitars and pounding drums. The dynamic range between the quietest and loudest moments on the record is wider than almost anything else on the charts.

Forty years of silence, then ten songs A Swedish pop group releases its ninth album in November, forty years after the previous one. The four members reunite for the first time since 1981, recording on an island studio in Stockholm. Simultaneously, a visual effects company films them performing in motion-capture suits with 160 cameras to create digital avatars for a concert residency. The album sells 400,000 copies in the UK before Christmas. It is the last record they will ever make.

Re-recording as rebellion Unable to buy back her original master recordings after a 2019 ownership dispute, a singer begins re-recording her entire catalog. Two re-recorded albums arrive in 2021, each bundled with previously unreleased songs from the vault. One includes a ten-minute version of a fan-favorite ballad that tops the Hot 100, breaking a forty-nine-year record as the longest song ever to reach number one. The re-recordings chart higher than the originals ever did.

Shampoo Press and Curl Two musicians begin recording together before the pandemic at a studio named after a hair salon. They spend eighteen months building a record designed to sound like a lost seventies variety show, complete with a funk legend as guest host. The production crew seeks out period-correct instruments: a specific German keyboard, congas from a legendary percussionist, drum kits with calfskin heads. The lead single tops the Hot 100 in April. The full album arrives in November, ten songs, thirty-six minutes, not a single sound that could not have existed in 1974.

GarageBand and jungle A university student in London begins uploading songs to TikTok built from samples of 1990s and 2000s dance tracks, produced on free software. She chops drum and bass breakbeats into miniature pop songs that rarely pass two minutes, layering breathy vocals over sped-up garage rhythms. The songs go viral before she signs to a label. By autumn she has a debut mixtape and a sound that sends thousands of young producers digging through old jungle and two-step records for sample material.

A saxophone and a sine wave A London electronic producer and an eighty-year-old American saxophonist record a single forty-six-minute piece with a symphony orchestra. The composition is built on a repeating seven-note motif that shifts imperceptibly across nine movements, the saxophone improvising over slowly evolving electronic textures and orchestral swells. It becomes one of the most acclaimed records of the year across every critical constituency, jazz, electronic, classical, indie. The saxophonist, active since the 1960s, reaches a new audience sixty years into his career.

Vinyl outsells CDs For the first time since 1991, vinyl LP sales surpass CD sales in the United States: 41.7 million records against 40.6 million discs. Vinyl revenue crosses one billion dollars, up sixty-one percent from the previous year, marking the fifteenth consecutive year of growth. The format accounts for more than a third of all physical and digital album sales. Meanwhile, streaming generates 83 percent of total US music revenue. The two extremes, the oldest playback format and the newest, squeeze everything in between.

Spatial audio arrives In June, a major streaming platform launches Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos support and lossless playback at no extra cost. Over seventy-five million songs become available in lossless codec, with high-resolution options reaching 24-bit at 192 kilohertz. The update auto-plays immersive mixes on compatible wireless earbuds, bringing surround-sound mixing out of home theaters and into commuters' headphones. Producers begin mixing for three-dimensional space, placing instruments above and behind the listener.

The crowd at NRG Park On November 5, a crowd crush at a Houston music festival kills ten people, all from compression asphyxia. The two-day event, expanded after a pandemic cancellation, draws tens of thousands of young fans attending their first large concert. The tragedy forces an industry-wide reckoning with crowd safety protocols, emergency communication, and the relationship between spectacle and responsibility. Artists across genres begin stopping shows at the first sign of crowd distress.