From the moment that [Tupac] passed I knew the things he was saying would eventually be carried on through someone else. But I was too young to know that I would be the one doing it. | | | | Did anyone make more of a splash in the 2010s? Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar at the BET Awards, Los Angeles, June 26, 2016.
(Kevin Winter/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “From the moment that [Tupac] passed I knew the things he was saying would eventually be carried on through someone else. But I was too young to know that I would be the one doing it.”
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| | rantnrave:// When the decade began, WHITNEY HOUSTON and AMY WINEHOUSE were still with us and BILLIE EILISH had just turned 8. SPOTIFY didn't exist in the US and people were buying MP3s. There were four major labels, down from five at the beginning of the previous decade and six just a few years before that. ADELE was an indie artist with some potential, TAYLOR SWIFT was a country star and DRAKE was a mixtape artist who had just signed his first record deal. Pop fans were obsessed with TIK TOK, which was a song by KESHA. People listened to albums. KANYE WEST wasn't getting along with the American president. Women had a hard time getting airplay on country radio and weren't treated as equals elsewhere and... oh wait, some things haven't changed. But so much has. The way music is distributed. The way it's marketed. The way it's heard. The way it's written and recorded. In the first decade of the 21st century, more than one visionary predicted music would soon flow as freely as water and electricity. These visionaries may or may not have understood that music would be cheaper, and way less lucrative, than those other seemingly free-flowing gifts. Or that its very accessibility would change almost every aspect of the music business, any maybe even music itself. In the second decade of the 21st century, music became water and drowned in its own undertow. And tried its best to learn to swim again. And in a decade where everything from $5 music-production apps to $50 professionally produced hip-hop beats to $500 wireless earbuds to $5,000 concert tickets to 50 million tracks of pop, hip-hop, country, metal, K-pop, reggaeton, techno and jazz was available at the click of a button to the world's 5 billion or so connected humans, the smart money, as always, was in touring. Or maybe the smart money was in digital distribution. Or artificial intelligence. The smartest money of all, though, from DRAKE to KAMASI WASHINGTON to the KNOWLES sisters to KACEY MUSGRAVES, was in making better music. Isn't it always? The stories below represent a slice of the 2010s as they happened in real time, along with newer essays trying to make sense of it all. You can find many more essays and lists in MusicSET: "Alright Alright Alright: The 2010s in Music." Happy new year and decade. MusicREDEF will be back in your inbox on Jan 6. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Billboard |
| Our picks for the 100 most important songs of the decade, from "Baby" to "Old Town Road." | | |
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 | Vulture |
| The most influential playlist in music is Spotify’s RapCaviar, which turns mixtape rappers into megastars. And it’s all curated by one man. | | |
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 | Fast Company |
| How did Spotify get here? Let us show you. | | |
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 | TechCrunch |
| How did a Swedish saxophonist from the 1980s transform into a leading entrepreneur in music’s digital transformation? Why are top technology VCs pouring money into a company that represents a roster of musicians? And how has the rise of music streaming created an opening for Kobalt to architect a new approach to the way the industry works? | | |
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| Billboard |
| Holed up at a recording studio in Chicago's Near North Side, Chancelor Bennett -- the local phenomenon known as Chance the Rapper -- is in wise-old-man mode. Chance, 23, holds a cigarette aloft in one hand, a pen in the other, his narrow shoulders hunched over a notebook. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| Yes, the highest-selling artist in the land (not named Adele) made Apple bend to her will. But the issue of how artists are compensated by record labels and streaming services is far more complex. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Live Nation Entertainment, as the new company is called, is a colossus unlike anything the industry has ever seen. | | |
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 | Pollstar |
| Rising stars like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift emerged to join the ranks of U2, The Rolling Stones, Pink, Beyoncé & Jay-Z. | | |
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| Vulture |
| It is a moment we will revisit for the rest of our lives, like Michael Jordan’s flu game, Michael Jackson’s 1993 Super Bowl statue act, or Sidney Poitier’s “Mr. Tibbs” speech from "In the Heat of the Night." | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| After last year's Grammys, the president of the Recording Academy said that women needed to "step up" in the business. Women and men in the business pushed back, but what's actually changed? | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| From 2010 to 2019, both the business and culture of music went through an unprecedented revolution. Here are the biggest, craziest moments to remember. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| The jury found that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, who share a songwriting credit on the song, had committed copyright infringement, and it awarded more than $7.3 million to Mr. Gaye’s family. | | |
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 | Dazed Digital |
| This decade, Atlanta’s rappers exploded out of the underground and onto the world stage, influencing everything in their path. | | |
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 | VICE |
| Beyoncé, Solange, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, and Rihanna released provocative, forward-thinking albums during the rise of the Trump candidacy, solidifying Black music's legacy as protest music. | | |
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 | The Tennessean |
| The emails and social media posts began flying along Music Row on Wednesday when word began spreading about a radio consultant's opinion that two songs by women shouldn't be played consecutively on country radio. "If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out," radio programmer Keith Hill told Country Aircheck. | | |
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 | She Shreds |
| With some companies like Fender stepping up to the call of the 21st century rather than staying stuck in the past, there may be hope yet for the guitar industry. But the work is far from over. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| The records that made the decade, starring Kendrick Lamar, Grimes, Bon Iver, Solange, Lana Del Rey, and many more. | | |
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| NPR Music |
| The allegations against Michael Jackson in the documentary "Leaving Neverland" make listening to his songs a struggle, one that resists the comfort those songs once provided. | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| How an opioid 30 times stronger than heroin infected the industry. Prince's sister and Tom Petty's family weigh in. | | |
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| Dazed Digital |
| In the 2010s an opioid crisis spread across America like wildfire, taking some of hip-hop’s brightest stars with it. | | |
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 | Complex |
| Streaming dominated all sides of rap in the 2010s. From the rise of SoundCloud rap to fixing the piracy problem, it shifted the landscape forever. | | |
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| Pitchfork |
| A decade in dance music that changed pop forever, according to Skrillex, Zedd, Boys Noize, and more. | | |
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 | NPR |
| Since its founding in 2008, Bandcamp has become a buzzing, artist-friendly hub for music lovers, with pay-what-you-want pricing and lots of rabbit holes leading to music you won't find anywhere else. In this episode of All Songs Considered, CEO and co-founder Ethan Diamond says that when an artist succeeds on Bandcamp, Bandcamp succeeds. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ is both a chart-topping phenomenon and a turning point for the music business. Here’s what happens when a social media platform becomes a label. | | |
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 | Trapital |
| To make the list, a business move had to do two things: Change the trajectory of the artist, mogul, businessperson, or company involved. Influence others by changing the landscape or following their lead. | | |
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 | Toronto Star |
| Posing as small-time scalpers, Star and CBC reporters talked to representatives of Ticketmaster’s resale division who said the company wants to share in ticket resale profits by facilitating mass scalping - in direct violation of its own terms of use. | | |
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 | CNN |
| Police told Denis Plaud not to look around when he emerged from hiding in a small room of the Bataclan theater Friday night. He looked. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| What constitutes a one-hit wonder? It should be cut and dry, but the designation can be pretty arbitrary, with gut feelings often trumping objective data. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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