Of course you know how drastically the music industry has evolved over the course of the last decade. As the Internet has reconfigured our daily lives (can you remember the first thing you did upon waking up a decade ago, if not immediately reach for your smartphone?), so too has it reshaped the way records are bought, sold, promoted, and created. Thanks to the prolificacy of online audio and video streaming services, along with the influx of piracy, record sales have plummeted across the board over the last 10 years. Compare this year, in which only one album (Taylor Swift’s 1989) hit platinum status, to the best-selling records of 2004 (Usher’s Confessions sold almost 8 million; even the 10th best-selling U.S. album, Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane, sold over 2.7 million copies).
Still, as striking as these changes have been, it’s still a trip to think of the ways we experienced music a decade ago compared to how we experience it today. Many of us were still clinging to CDs then; some of us were getting used to MP3s, maybe collecting them from file-sharing sites like Napster or Kazaa. For me, the experience of listening to music online was still secondary to the mix CDs that I’d grown obsessed with burning for car rides, or for my Discman on the walk home from school.
Today, our experience of discovering, sharing, and listening to music primarily occurs online, and the biggest technological advances of the last decade reflect that. Instead of hardware like CD players, music’s biggest innovations now mostly occur in the form of a website or an app. And where new music technology once aimed to make our listening experience more robust, now it often feels like the ultimate goal is simplification: What’s the most efficient, streamlined, and all-encompassing way to be a music fan, or a musician, or a record label? To come up with this technological solution to 21st century problems requires not just a knack for predicting the future, but a keen understanding of the present. Often, the creators of the biggest breakthroughs in music technology are simply music fans themselves. We’ve broken down some of the most influential tech advances in the last decade of music, and the minds behind them.