2023 in Music

A song uploaded from a valley in Virginia On August 8, a bearded singer sitting on a stool in the Blue Ridge Mountains uploads a song to YouTube through a small local channel. Within three days it has five million views. By August 26, it debuts at number one on the Hot 100, making him the first artist in chart history to reach the top with no prior chart entry of any kind. The song is referenced in the opening question of the first Republican presidential debate before the singer has done a single interview. He later says both political parties weaponized it.

Four country number ones in a row Between late spring and early fall, four country songs hold the number-one spot on the Hot 100 in consecutive weeks. It has not happened since 1975. The songs share almost nothing sonically, ranging from a polished Nashville ballad to a raw folk recording to a protest anthem from an unknown, but their simultaneous dominance signals a structural shift. Country is no longer a format walled off from the mainstream. Streaming has dissolved the border.

Sixty-five years to number one In December, a holiday single originally released in 1958 finally reaches number one on the Hot 100. Its singer is seventy-eight years old, making her the oldest artist ever to top the chart. The song's sixty-five-year climb is the longest journey to number one in the chart's history. Seasonal streaming patterns, which concentrate listening around a few familiar recordings every winter, accomplish what six decades of radio play never quite managed.

A flute record with no words After a seventeen-year gap since his last solo material, one of hip-hop's most celebrated voices releases a debut album that contains no rapping and no singing. It is eighty-seven minutes of contrabass flutes, bamboo flutes, and Mayan flutes layered over spiritual jazz instrumentation. The opening track is titled I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a Rap Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time. It earns a nomination for Album of the Year.

Corridos go global A guitar-driven narrative form rooted in Mexican street music, updated with hip-hop production and trap cadences, breaks through to the American mainstream. Its leading figure becomes the most-streamed Latin artist on Spotify, surpassing the previous year's dominant voice. A duet built on a simple requinto guitar riff and stacked harmonies becomes the first regional Mexican song to reach number one on any major chart and collects 1.5 billion streams. Combined monthly listeners for the genre's core artists grow from 1.6 million in 2019 to 54.1 million.

The arena DJ set On a Saturday night in February, three electronic producers sell out Madison Square Garden in under three minutes for a five-hour DJ set running from seven in the evening until midnight. One of the three drops an entire album during the show itself, his first release in nearly a decade. Earlier that week, the trio played pop-up sets at small Brooklyn and Manhattan clubs and DJ'd from a convertible school bus in Times Square. The evening proves that dance music, stripped of stage sets and pyrotechnics, can fill arenas on the strength of track selection alone.

Shoegaze on earbuds A teenager records a track using nothing but a phone and a pair of consumer earbuds, layering distorted vocals and washed-out guitars into something that sounds like it was made on a wall of effects pedals. The song collects thirty million streams, nearly double the lifetime total of the genre's most famous pioneers on the same platform. Spotify reports shoegaze streams up fifty percent year over year, with daily searches for the genre up two hundred and twenty percent. More than sixty percent of the most-streamed shoegaze artists' listeners belong to Gen Z.

Half a million in a week A thirty-six-track country album moves 501,000 units in its first week, seventy-six percent of them driven by streaming rather than purchases. It is the largest streaming week ever for a country record, nearly half a billion on-demand plays, and only the ninth album in a decade to cross the 500,000-unit threshold. The numbers place a Nashville act alongside the biggest names in pop and hip-hop and confirm that country's audience has migrated to the same platforms as everyone else.

Riot grrrl in the arena A pop star's second album arrives in September recorded partly the old-fashioned way: two songs tracked live with a full band in a single room, a process that had become almost unheard-of in modern pop production. The arrangements lean on vintage analog synthesizers and a mellotron, with a plugin simulating 1960s vinyl coloration applied to the vocals. The album owes an audible debt to 1990s guitar-driven rock, channeling its distortion and its anger into songs designed for stadium tours.

The first AI hit, sort of In April, a track mimicking the voices of two of rap's biggest stars appears on social media and racks up nine million views in days. It is entirely AI-generated. The label that owns both artists' catalogs issues a takedown, but the legal basis is shaky: the removal succeeds only because a snippet of a copyrighted producer tag was accidentally left in the file. No law covers vocal likeness cloning. The incident forces the entire industry to confront a question it has no answer for.

A supergroup in Malibu Three singer-songwriters who released an EP together five years earlier reconvene at a studio in Malibu for nearly a month, living together and working ten-hour days. The resulting album, their first full-length, is self-produced with a co-producer known for her work in alternative rock. It wins the Grammy for Best Rock Song. The collaboration model, three solo artists pooling their creative identities into a single project with no clear frontperson, becomes one of the year's most talked-about experiments in band dynamics.

Swiftonomics A stadium tour becomes the first in history to gross over one billion dollars, then two billion. Bloomberg Economics estimates that fifty-three US concerts alone add 4.3 billion dollars to GDP. The average concertgoer spends 1,300 dollars on travel, hotels, food, and merchandise. Hotel occupancy in Chicago hits 96.8 percent on show nights. The tour's economic footprint is large enough to generate a new term in financial journalism and to prompt a Senate hearing on ticketing monopolies after the presale system crashes.