From a bone flute 40,000 years old to Gregorian chant, Beethoven, the blues, hip-hop and AI
Music is as old as cave painting, perhaps older. In Greece, music was a branch of mathematics dealing with "number in motion," and a matter of education and politics that could change a listener's character.
One of the oldest musical instruments.
A flute made from a vulture bone, found in the Hohle Fels cave in Germany, is about 40,000 years old. Its finger holes let it play several notes.
The oldest music notation that can be at least partly deciphered.
A hymn inscribed on a clay tablet from Ugarit in Syria, it is the earliest surviving written music from the culture of Mesopotamian clay tablets.
Whole-number ratios of string length make harmony.
Pythagoras found that halving a string sounds an octave higher (2:1), two-thirds of it a fifth higher (3:2) and three-quarters a fourth higher (4:3), and that these notes sound well together. This led to the "music of the spheres," the idea that the planets too make harmonious sounds, and music joined arithmetic, geometry and astronomy in the quadrivium, which lasted into the medieval university.
Keep only the modes that build courage.
The Greeks believed modes such as the Dorian, Phrygian and Lydian each had a distinct character and could change the listener's. In the Republic, Plato said modes that make people soft should be banned. Aristoxenus, by contrast, argued that intervals should be judged by the ear, not by numerical ratios. The conflict between mathematics and perception would continue.
The center of medieval music was the church. Chants sung in a single unaccompanied melody were passed on entirely by memory, and signs to mark the rise and fall of a melody slowly appeared.
The oldest song that survives complete.
A Greek gravestone is inscribed with both lyrics and musical notation, so it can still be sung from beginning to end. It begins, "While you live, shine."
Audible sound is the lowest level of music.
Boethius divided music into three levels: the harmony of the cosmos, the harmony of the human soul and body, and the sounds actually played. His book was the textbook of music theory for a thousand years of the Middle Ages.
A single melody sung in Latin.
Unaccompanied chant in the church modes was named after Pope Gregory I (though he did not actually compose it). Hundreds of chants were passed on entirely by memory.
Writing down a melody's shape, and adding a second line.
Signs (neumes) appeared above the text to show the rise and fall of a melody, though not exact pitches. Around the same time came organum, in which a second line was sung in parallel a fourth or fifth below the chant. It was the beginning of polyphony.
Once Guido of Arezzo's invention made it possible to write music down precisely, complex music could be composed. As Gothic cathedrals soared skyward, music within them also rose in layers.
The origin of do-re-mi.
The Italian monk Guido drew horizontal lines to show pitch exactly, the direct ancestor of the staff. He also named the notes ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la after the first syllables of each line of a hymn (ut later became do). He is said to have cut the time needed to learn the chant repertoire from ten years to a few months. In the history of music, it is as important as the invention of writing.
Poet-musicians who sang of courtly love.
The poet-musicians of southern France sang of love at court rather than in church. A tradition of secular music began.
Many voices moving independently.
Léonin and Pérotin at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris created large-scale polyphony in which several voices moved independently, and ways to notate rhythm emerged.
A complete Mass by a single composer.
In the era of the Ars Nova, "new technique," rhythm grew far more complex. Guillaume de Machaut is considered the first to compose a complete Mass as a single work. The idea of the "composer" came into focus.
In the Middle Ages only the octave, fifth and fourth counted as perfect consonances. In the Renaissance, thirds and sixths were accepted, laying the basis of Western harmony, and counterpoint, the harmonizing of several independent melodies, entered its golden age. Printed music carried music across borders.
The sweet sound of thirds and sixths.
English composers such as John Dunstable spread to the Continent a soft sound rich in thirds and sixths. It became the foundation of later Western harmony.
Each voice takes up the melody in turn.
After Dufay, Josquin des Prez perfected imitative counterpoint, in which a melody begun by one voice is taken up by the others in turn. The ideal resembled the balanced compositions of Renaissance painting.
Petrucci in Venice.
Petrucci was the first to print polyphonic music with movable type. As hand-copied scores gave way to mass-produced ones, music spread rapidly across borders.
Hymns sung by the whole congregation.
Luther valued music highly and created hymns for the whole congregation to sing together in German. The tradition continued for 200 years, all the way to Bach.
Polyphony in which the words can be heard.
The Council of Trent debated the problem that complex polyphony made the words impossible to hear. The story that Palestrina saved church polyphony with a beautiful Mass in which every word was clear is an exaggerated legend, but his music was the model for teaching counterpoint for centuries.
An irrational number saves music.
Stack twelve fifths in Pythagorean ratios and you do not land exactly seven octaves up; you overshoot slightly (the Pythagorean comma). So with pure-ratio tuning, some keys were unusable. Divide the octave into twelve equal steps with the ratio of the twelfth root of two, and every key becomes usable. Zhu Zaiyu of Ming China was the first to calculate this precisely, and in Europe Simon Stevin did so around the same time.
Painting the feelings of the words in music.
The madrigal, polyphonic song set to secular poetry, vividly painted the feelings of its text: sighs, laughter, death. Gesualdo wrote astonishingly radical chromatic harmony. He is also notorious as a nobleman who murdered his wife and her lover.
Opera was born, the church modes were reduced to major and minor, and tonality, the grammar of Western music for the next 300 years, was established. Music for instruments alone, not just as accompaniment to song, became independent.
Opera, born from an attempt to revive Greek tragedy.
A circle of Florentine scholars, the Camerata, believed Greek tragedy had originally been sung and tried to revive it. Since polyphony obscured the words, they chose a single melody carrying the text supported by chords. Monteverdi's L'Orfeo is considered the first great opera.
A keyboard that plays soft and loud, and the golden age of the violin.
Cristofori invented the piano, whose volume changes with how hard the keys are struck. In the same period Stradivari made violins still considered the finest ever built.
The principles of harmony, and all 24 keys.
Rameau systematized the principles of harmony in theory. The same year Bach, in The Well-Tempered Clavier, wrote pieces in all 24 major and minor keys, showing the possibilities of a tuning in which every key could be used (strictly speaking, the consensus is that it was a "well-tempered" tuning, not today's exact equal temperament).
Soloist and orchestra in competition.
The concerto, in which a solo instrument and orchestra trade passages, became the center of Baroque instrumental music. Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, which paints the scenes of the seasons in sound, is its most famous example.
A German composer's success in England.
Born in Germany the same year as Bach, Handel moved to England and won popular success with operas and oratorios. He is famous for the "Hallelujah" chorus.
The peak of Baroque counterpoint.
Bach, who as a church music director wrote a cantata every week, left works late in life that summed up the art of counterpoint. In his lifetime he was seen as old-fashioned and was nearly forgotten after his death, until Mendelssohn revived the St Matthew Passion in 1829.
In the Age of Enlightenment, clear, balanced melodies were preferred over the complex counterpoint of the Baroque. Sonata form, which presents two contrasting themes, develops them and brings them back, became the blueprint for the symphony and the string quartet. Alongside the aristocratic courts, public concerts for citizens multiplied.
The father of the symphony.
Working for nearly 30 years as court musician to Hungary's Esterházy family, Haydn wrote 104 symphonies and established the string quartet. Late in life he won great success with public concerts in London.
Servants who outwit their noble master.
Mozart, a prodigy who began composing at five, left the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg and tried to live in Vienna without a patron. He left near-perfect works in every genre, opera, symphony and concerto, and died in 1791 at 35.
A dedication to Napoleon, torn out.
Losing his hearing, Beethoven confessed in an 1802 letter to his brothers that he had contemplated suicide but resolved to live for his art. He is said to have meant to dedicate his Third Symphony, the Eroica, to Napoleon, then torn out the dedication page in fury when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Beethoven created the image of the composer as an independent artist rather than a nobleman's servant.
Songs in which poem and piano paint together.
Schubert wrote more than 600 German art songs (Lieder) setting poems to music. The piano is not mere accompaniment; it paints the poem's scenes and feelings alongside the voice. He died at 31.
An era that valued emotion, the individual, nature and the nation over reason. The middle class became the main audience in concert halls and at the home piano, and star performers who dazzled with virtuosity appeared.
A choral symphony by a deaf composer.
Written when he was completely deaf, this symphony was the first to bring a chorus into its final movement. Its "Ode to Joy" is today the anthem of the European Union.
The St Matthew Passion, performed again after a century.
When the twenty-year-old Mendelssohn performed Bach's St Matthew Passion again, the forgotten Bach was revived. From then on the idea of a "classical repertoire," performing the great works of the past, took hold.
A tale of love and despair told in music.
This symphony, which tells in music the story of an artist who falls in love and despairs, is the classic example of program music, music that carries a story from outside itself. It dramatically expanded the orchestra's palette of color.
The first superstar pianist, and the poet of the piano.
Liszt, who invented the solo piano recital and drove audiences into a frenzy, was the first superstar, and he created the symphonic poem, music that expresses stories and pictures. Chopin, writing almost only for piano, made it a singing instrument and raised Polish folk dances to art music.
The golden age of Italian opera.
With La Traviata, Aida and more, Verdi led Italian opera, and his operas became symbols of the movement for Italian unification. His successor Puccini left La Bohème and Madama Butterfly.
Timbre is a ratio of overtones.
The physicist Hermann von Helmholtz showed that a single note is a mixture of a fundamental and overtones at whole-number multiples of its frequency, and that the proportions of those overtones give each instrument its timbre. Fourier series were his tool of analysis. Pythagoras's whole-number ratios reconnected through Fourier analysis.
A chord that never resolves.
The opening chord, the so-called Tristan chord, never resolves but keeps slipping into the next tension, expressing endless longing. Shaking the foundations of tonality, it is counted as a starting point of 20th-century atonal music. Wagner was steeped in Schopenhauer, and his antisemitic writings and the later adoration of Hitler keep him controversial to this day.
Breaking away from German dominance, national schools emerged that drew on each country's folk songs and history, and the music world split into the camps of Brahms and Wagner. Then Edison's phonograph began the biggest revolution in medium since Guido's notation.
The Russian Five and the national schools.
Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and the rest of the Russian "Five" brought their country's folk songs and history into music. Smetana and Dvořák in Bohemia and Grieg in Norway belonged to the same current.
A fifteen-hour music drama, and pure instrumental music.
Wagner built the Bayreuth theater solely for his own operas and premiered the four-part Ring of the Nibelung. His short melodies attached to characters and ideas (leitmotifs) became the theme technique of today's film music. The same year Brahms released his First Symphony, representing the opposing camp that upheld classical form and the meaning of music in itself.
Storing music without a live performance.
Edison invented the phonograph, which records and plays back sound. For the first time, music could be stored and heard again and again without a live performance. It later laid the ground for music that is hard to write down, like jazz and popular music, to spread.
From worship to the harshest critique.
Schopenhauer ranked music highest among the arts because it directly expresses the will, the essence of the world. The young Nietzsche was an ardent worshipper of Wagner, then broke with him in The Case of Wagner, his harshest critique.
A symphony written in America.
Czech composer Antonín Dvořák wrote this symphony while heading the National Conservatory in New York, and said the future of American music lay in African American spirituals and Native American music. The same year Tchaikovsky left his last symphony, the Pathétique, and died.
A dreamlike sound from the gamelan.
Debussy was deeply struck by Indonesian gamelan at the 1889 Paris World's Fair. In place of major–minor tension and resolution, he created vague, dreamlike sounds with whole-tone and pentatonic scales. Like Impressionism in painting, it captured the mood and color of a moment, so it is called musical Impressionism.
Syncopated piano: ragtime.
The ragtime of Black composer Scott Joplin dressed march form in syncopated rhythms. Its sheet music is said to have sold over a million copies, and it became a stepping stone to jazz.
As Picasso broke perspective and Einstein absolute space and time, 300-year-old tonality collapsed in music. In America the blues and jazz were born, and recording and radio made music a mass industry.
Twelve bars, three chords and the blue note.
Black musicians of the Mississippi Delta made this music from African rhythms, call and response, work songs and spirituals. Its twelve-bar form cycling through three chords, its blue notes that slightly flatten the third and seventh, and its first-person confessions of poverty and parting became the DNA of all later rock and hip-hop. W.C. Handy heard the blues at a train station in 1903 and began publishing it as sheet music.
Taking a recorder to the countryside.
Bartók traveled the villages of Hungary and Eastern Europe, recording thousands of folk songs, and wove their rhythms and modes into modern music. He was a pioneer of ethnomusicology.
Abandoning tonality completely.
Schoenberg began writing music that abandoned tonality, organized around a home key, altogether. It came almost the same year that Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) broke perspective.
Jeers and shouting at the premiere.
At the Paris premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, its primal, violent rhythms and dissonance turned the audience into an uproar of jeers and shouts. If Schoenberg dismantled harmony, Stravinsky dismantled rhythm.
A new music from New Orleans.
In New Orleans, the blues, ragtime and brass bands mixed with European harmony to create jazz, and the first jazz record came out in 1917. Improvisation and a syncopated rhythmic feel (swing) are at its core. Around the same time, the Great Migration of millions of Black Southerners to the industrial cities of the North began.
Music flows into the home.
The first commercial radio broadcasting began in the United States, and as radio spread rapidly through the 1920s, music became a mass industry.
All twelve notes as equals.
Abandoning tonality left music without an organizing principle. Schoenberg created the twelve-tone technique, building a whole piece from a row that uses each of the twelve notes once, and its transformations: a kind of mathematical system. With his students Berg and Webern, he is known as the Second Viennese School.
Jazz meets classical.
Gershwin brought the rhythms of jazz and the blues scale into the form of a piano concerto.
The improvised solo becomes art.
Louis Armstrong turned improvisation, once part of the ensemble, into the soloist's art. His trumpet and singing set the standard for jazz and popular singing that followed.
Big bands become the mainstream of popular music.
The big-band swing of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Count Basie became the mainstream of American popular music. People danced to jazz.
The bluesman who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads.
Robert Johnson recorded only 29 songs before dying in 1938 at 27. His sudden leap in guitar skill gave rise to the legend that he had sold his soul to the devil. Later Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin would cover his songs almost reverently. He is considered the first member of the "27 Club" of musicians who died at 27.
From music for dancing to music for listening.
With bebop, fast and harmonically complex, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie turned jazz into an art music for listening.
In the postwar boom, teenagers emerged as a new class of consumers, and Black blues met white country to create rock 'n' roll. While the Beatles raised popular music to art, contemporary composition embraced silence, chance and even electronic sound as music.
Twenty minutes a side, and composing with recorded sound.
The 33⅓ rpm LP record made it possible to hold long pieces and albums. The same year France's Pierre Schaeffer presented musique concrète, works made by editing recorded sounds such as trains. It was the beginning of the idea of using the recording medium itself as an instrument.
The loud sound of city clubs.
Black musicians who had migrated north plugged their guitars into amplifiers to be heard in loud city clubs, and Muddy Waters's Chicago electric blues was born. The same year, starting with the Fender Telecaster and followed by the Gibson Les Paul (1952) and Stratocaster (1954), solid-body electric guitars arrived and the instrument of rock was ready.
A piece in which nothing is played.
While the performer sits at the piano and plays nothing, the coughs in the hall and the noise outside become the music. Like Duchamp's Fountain, it asks what music is. Two years later Xenakis presented Metastaseis, applying probability theory and statistical mechanics directly to composition.
A white boy who sang like a Black singer.
Elvis, a poor white young man from Memphis, debuted recording blues songs at Sun Records and became a national star in 1956. White stars singing Black music and earning far more money also marked the start of a recurring debate over cultural appropriation.
The prototype of rock guitar.
Chuck Berry turned blues guitar into fast, sharp riffs and sang about teenagers' cars, school and romance. With Little Richard's screaming vocals and Bo Diddley's distinctive beat, these Black pioneers created rock 'n' roll. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones both started with his songs.
Three things in one year.
Buddy Holly, who created the band lineup of two guitars, bass and drums and the model of the singer-songwriter, died in a plane crash at 22. The same year Motown Records, founded by a Black owner, opened in Detroit, and Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album of all time.
73 million watch the Beatles.
Young Britons who had taught themselves from records of Black American music brought that music back to America. About 73 million people watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and British bands swept the American charts. The same year the Kinks used a distorted sound made by slashing an amplifier speaker, along with power chords, and Moog built his synthesizer.
Folk's traitor, a revolutionary of lyrics.
Bob Dylan, standard-bearer of the folk revival that rose with the civil rights movement, was booed when he walked on with an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. But rock and folk merged, and popular song lyrics rose to the level of poetry and literature. In 2016 he became the first popular musician to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The same year Steve Reich presented minimalism, repeating short patterns that slowly drift out of phase.
The studio becomes an instrument, and the groove of the one.
The Beatles, who stopped touring in 1966, used the studio itself as a compositional tool, running tape backward, adding sitar and string quartet and layering recordings. Competing with the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, they made the album a work of art. The same year James Brown created funk, emphasizing the first beat of the bar over melody, and his drum breaks became the most sampled sounds in hip-hop.
The peak of peace and love, and the crack.
At Woodstock, where more than 400,000 people gathered, Jimi Hendrix played the American national anthem like the sound of bombing. He redefined the electric guitar by using amplifier feedback and distortion as tools of expression. A few months later a killing in the audience at the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert became the symbol of the end of the hippie dream. Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all went on to die at 27.
Rock split into hard rock, heavy metal, progressive, glam and punk. In the Bronx in New York, hip-hop was born from nothing but records and turntables, and drum machines and samplers became new instruments. MTV turned music into something you watch.
Heavy metal born in an industrial town.
Black Sabbath, from the working class of Birmingham, England, became the origin of heavy metal with a dark, heavy, slow sound. Guitarist Tony Iommi had lost his fingertips in a factory accident, and loosening and tuning down his strings so he could play with his injured hand became the heavy sound characteristic of metal. Led Zeppelin amplified the blues to enormous volume and weight and set the standard for hard rock.
A birthday party in the Bronx.
On August 11, DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant, noticed that people went wildest for the drum-only interludes (breaks) in funk and soul records, and used two copies of the same record to loop that section endlessly. Hip-hop was born in a Bronx burning from poverty and arson, where people could not afford instruments. The same year Pink Floyd's concept album went on to spend more than 900 weeks on the Billboard album chart.
Ballad, opera and hard rock in six minutes.
Queen's song, dismissed as too long for radio, held the top of the UK chart for nine weeks. Progressive rock, with long pieces and complex structures influenced by classical music, and David Bowie's theatrical glam rock marked one extreme of 1970s rock.
If you know three chords, you can start a band.
It was a rebellion against rock that had grown too long, too expensive, too technical and too rich. The Ramones blasted out two-minute songs at New York's CBGB, and in Britain the Sex Pistols released a song mocking the Queen's Silver Jubilee and were banned from the airwaves. Punk burned out in a few years but became the ancestor of almost all alternative rock.
The first hip-hop hit.
Afrika Bambaataa defined hip-hop's four elements, DJing, rapping, breakdancing and graffiti, and tried to turn gang violence into music and dance competition, while Grandmaster Flash refined turntable technique. This song by the Sugarhill Gang first spread hip-hop on record.
The heavy kick of a failed drum machine.
Roland's TR-808 drum machine was a commercial failure because it didn't sound like real drums. But its heavy, booming kick drum became the emblem of hip-hop and electronic music, all the way to today's trap.
From listening to watching.
With MTV's launch, looks and visual style became important. The following year Michael Jackson's Thriller, counted as the best-selling album ever, broke the barrier for Black artists on an MTV that had focused on white rock.
From party music to social protest, and on to digital.
This song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five directly denounced the poverty and violence of the ghetto and made hip-hop a vehicle for social commentary. The same year the CD arrived and music began to go digital.
Rock and hip-hop break down a wall and meet.
In the video for Run-DMC's remake with Aerosmith, the two groups smash through a wall to meet, a symbol of hip-hop entering the white teenage market. The same year Metallica released the landmark of thrash metal, combining punk's speed and metal's weight. The next year, after controversy over explicit lyrics, "Parental Advisory" stickers began appearing on records.
Making songs by cutting and stacking recorded sound.
With samplers like the Akai MPC, producers could cut pieces of existing records, loop and stack them into new songs. Public Enemy laid political messages over walls of noise built from dozens of samples, and Rakim raised rap to literary heights. In LA, N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton depicted police violence and street life so rawly that it drew a warning letter from the FBI.
Grunge ousted glam metal overnight, and hip-hop, after the tragedy of the East–West feud, moved to the center of the mainstream. At the end of the century, file sharing began to shake the record industry.
The flannel-shirt rebellion.
Mixing punk's raw energy, metal's weight and Beatles-like melody, Nirvana's album knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard chart the following January. Flashy glam metal became uncool overnight. The same year, after a lawsuit over uncleared samples was lost, hip-hop production, which had used dozens of samples per track, changed dramatically.
Laid-back G-funk.
Dr. Dre, formerly of N.W.A, created the G-funk sound with funk samples and synthesizers and launched Snoop Dogg. The same year, when acquittals in a police beating case sparked the LA riots, N.W.A's music was received as prophecy.
The peak of East Coast hip-hop, and another member of the 27 Club.
Nas's Illmatic and the Wu-Tang Clan marked the peak of New York hip-hop. The same year Kurt Cobain, tormented by unwanted fame, died at 27. Green Day's Dookie brought pop-punk into the mainstream.
Oasis versus Blur.
Two bands of Britpop, heirs of the British bands of the 1960s, released singles on the same day and competed for sales, and it became national news. Blur won the singles battle; Oasis dominated album sales.
The tragedy of the East–West feud.
The feud centered on Tupac in the West and the Notorious B.I.G. in the East ended in tragedy, with Tupac shot dead in 1996 and Biggie in 1997. Both cases remained unsolved for decades.
Singing the alienation of technological society.
Radiohead reached the peak of 1990s rock with an album depicting the anxiety and alienation of technological society. Rage Against the Machine loaded rap and heavy guitar with radical political messages, opening the way for nu metal, which blended rap and metal.
Free file sharing, and a Grammy for Album of the Year.
As college student Shawn Fanning's Napster spread MP3 file sharing, record sales began to plunge. The same year The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill became the first hip-hop album to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, and Eminem, produced by Dr. Dre, debuted on his way to becoming the best-selling rapper in history.
People began buying songs instead of albums, and Myspace and YouTube launched bands and rappers. Gangsta rap faded, and a more diverse, introspective hip-hop took the lead.
Rock without guitars, and the peak of nu metal.
Radiohead all but abandoned the guitar and widened rock's boundaries with electronic music and experiment. The same year Linkin Park's debut became one of the best-selling debut albums of the 21st century, marking the peak of nu metal, and Eminem set the record for the fastest-selling rap album.
A thousand songs in your pocket, and short, dry guitars.
With Apple's iPod and the iTunes Store of 2003, people began buying music song by song instead of by album. The same year the Strokes' Is This It revived short, dry 1970s-style guitar rock against the excesses of nu metal, and on Jay-Z's The Blueprint a young producer named Kanye West laid down sped-up soul samples.
A football chant, and the era of the South.
The White Stripes' guitar riff later became a chant in football stadiums around the world. The same year OutKast's "Hey Ya!" became a national hit, and T.I. of Atlanta turned "trap," slang for a drug house, into the name of a genre with his album title. An era of the South opened in a hip-hop centered on New York and LA.
A rapper who wasn't a gangster, and a punk opera against war.
Kanye West talked about faith, insecurity and consumerism from the point of view not of a drug dealer but of a middle-class college dropout. Green Day returned to the top with a punk rock opera criticizing the Iraq War.
A band launched by the internet.
Arctic Monkeys, who became famous first as fans spread their demos online, released the fastest-selling debut album in British history. Centered on Myspace, emo and pop-punk bands such as My Chemical Romance shaped teenage culture.
Pay what you want, and the decline of gangsta rap.
Radiohead released their new album on their website without a label and let listeners set the price. The same year Kanye and 50 Cent released albums on the same day and competed; Kanye won, a symbol of leadership passing from hard gangsta rap to a more diverse hip-hop. Soulja Boy's "Crank That" was the first major hit to reach number one through YouTube dance imitations.
The start of streaming, and heartbreak sung through Auto-Tune.
Spotify launched, opening the streaming era. Kanye confessed breakup and loss in Auto-Tuned singing instead of rap, and the album, then a strange experiment, became the blueprint for an entire next generation, Drake included.
As streaming counts entered the charts, the music young people played on repeat, hip-hop, became the center of popular music. Rock was pushed off the charts, and the very boundaries of genre began to collapse.
The peak of maximalism.
Kanye West led hip-hop's experiments, changing his sound with every album. The same year Drake, moving between rap and singing, began to become the biggest star of the 2010s streaming era.
Chicago's ominous sound, and a cinematic day in Compton.
Violent, ominous drill emerged from Chicago around Chief Keef, and crossed to Britain to become UK drill. The same year Kendrick Lamar released an album structured like a film about a day in the life of a boy growing up in Compton.
Billboard starts counting streams.
When Billboard began including streams in its album chart, hip-hop benefited most. Atlanta trap, with the TR-808's deep bass and rapid-fire hi-hats, became the default sound of popular music worldwide. The same year Gene Simmons of Kiss declared rock dead.
"Alright," a song that became a protest chant.
Kendrick Lamar explored Black history and identity over jazz, funk and soul, and the track "Alright" became a chant at Black Lives Matter protests.
An album that became a farewell.
David Bowie released a final album about death and died two days later. Prince died the same year, and Chance the Rapper won a Grammy for an album released only on streaming without a label, forcing the Grammys to change their rules.
The most consumed genre changes.
In the United States, hip-hop/R&B overtook rock as the most consumed genre, taking the place rock had held since the 1950s. Cardi B's "Bodak Yellow" became the first solo number one by a female rapper since Lauryn Hill, and teenage rappers who uploaded bedroom recordings to SoundCloud became stars with rap blending punk and emo feeling. But Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, Mac Miller and Juice WRLD all died in their twenties between 2017 and 2019.
The first Pulitzer for music outside classical and jazz.
Kendrick Lamar's DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Childish Gambino's "This Is America," with its shocking video about gun violence and race, became the first rap song to win the Grammys for Record and Song of the Year. The same year Beyoncé became the first Black woman to headline Coachella.
A country-rap song pulled from the country chart.
When Billboard pulled Lil Nas X's song, spread by TikTok memes, from the country chart for not being country enough, a controversy erupted over racial lines between genres. With its remix it spent a record 19 consecutive weeks at number one, a symbol that the very boundaries of genre were collapsing.
Live shows stopped, short videos made hits, and old songs came back to life. Rock shifted from a chart genre to one of concerts, vinyl and fandom, and hip-hop too became one genre among many. AI raised anew the question of who owns whose voice.
12 million at a concert inside a game.
COVID-19 halted concerts around the world. More than 12 million concurrent players attended Travis Scott's virtual concert inside the game Fortnite. The same year Pop Smoke was shot dead at 20, and Playboi Carti's Whole Lotta Red created the subgenre "rage" with punk-rock energy. A single skateboarding video by one man sent Fleetwood Mac's 1977 song back onto the charts, showing TikTok's power.
A rock band wins Eurovision.
Italy's Måneskin won Eurovision and became a global hit, showing that a rock band could still become an international star. As pop albums such as Olivia Rodrigo's SOUR borrowed the sound of pop-punk, the emo and pop-punk of the 2000s made a big comeback. The same year a crowd surge at Travis Scott's Astroworld Festival killed ten people.
The LP passes the CD.
Paradoxically, in the streaming era, LP sales kept growing, and in the United States they outsold CDs in units for the first time since 1987. The same year a 1986 Metallica song featured in the series Stranger Things got teenagers listening to Metallica anew.
The last Beatles song, revived by AI.
Hip-hop celebrated 50 years since Kool Herc's party, but the same year talk of a hip-hop crisis arose as no hip-hop song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for months. A fake song imitating the voices of Drake and the Weeknd with AI went viral and was taken down, and the Beatles used AI to isolate John Lennon's voice from a worn cassette demo and complete their final song, "Now and Then."
The biggest diss battle in hip-hop history.
The two traded attack tracks for weeks, and Kendrick's "Not Like Us" landed the decisive blow and reached number one. The same year Shaboozey's country-hip-hop song matched "Old Town Road" with 19 weeks at number one, and Linkin Park reunited with a new vocalist.
The end of an era, and a new question.
"Not Like Us" won the Grammys for Record and Song of the Year, and Kendrick played the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show ever. In July Black Sabbath played a final show with the original members in their hometown of Birmingham, and Ozzy Osbourne died a few weeks later. The masked metal band Sleep Token topped the Billboard album chart, and Oasis toured on a reunion after 16 years. And a rock band with more than a million monthly listeners on streaming turned out to be a virtual band made with AI.