Musical Decades: The Techie 2000s
Every decade in the history of pop music tells a story. And every story must have its stars—its protagonists … and antagonists.
As we look back over the musical territory our culture has covered between Jan. 1, 2000, and Dec. 31, 2009, there's no shortage of megawatt performers: Beyoncé, Nickelback, Britney Spears, Eminem, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Carrie Underwood, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, The Black Eyed Peas, Radiohead. In creating such a list, you'd be obligated to add The Beatles and Michael Jackson, considering their reemerging—partially posthumous—status. And at the very end of it, chronologically, at least, would be an unlikely church volunteer named Susan Boyle whose debut full of classic covers hit triple-platinum in the span of a few weeks as the decade rolled to a close.
But very much like an epic James Cameron film, it wasn't really the performances that defined this decade. It was the technology that gave them their platform. From the digital download to the iPod, the double-zeros fundamentally altered the way we experience music. Never before has so much music been so readily available—legally and illegally. And that fact set up the paradox of the aughts: It was a decade when more became less.
Terminator MP3
From the vantage point of the new millennium, who could have predicted how radically the music world would change in just a few short years? Especially because it seemed the industry was on the verge of a new golden age in the decade's opening days—at least as far as album sales were concerned.
On March 21, 2000, 'N Sync's second album, No Strings Attached, landed on retail shelves. But only briefly did it rest there. The ensuing feeding frenzy saw the band move 1.1 million albums … in one day. Six days later, fans had gobbled up 2.4 million units—the best sales week in music history. And that was just a fraction of the 11.1 million copies that would eventually sell in the United States alone.
Fast-forward nine years to June 2009. During the slowest sales week that month, all 200 albums combined on Billboard's flagship chart sold fewer that 2.4 million copies.
So what happened?
An oversimplified answer is the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3—popularly known as the MP3 file. This digital audio format compressed music into a manageable file size, and by 1997 Internet users had begun to exchange songs online. By 1999, as a new site called Napster began facilitating so-called peer-to-peer file sharing—a practice also known by the Recording Industry Association of America as piracy. Rapper Jay-Z famously called its proliferation "a hole in the universe."
That first iteration of Napster was effectively shut down in 2001, but the MP3 genie was out of the cyber-bottle and was wreaking havoc on a long-held sales model based on the album format.
The iPod Abyss
One cryptic moniker demanded another, evidently, so on October 23, 2001, Apple debuted its iPod, the now ubiquitous portable music player that would further propel the nascent digital music revolution. The device enabled users to portably store and instantly access … MP3 files. Apple's digital music store, iTunes, arrived two years later. And by 2008, Steve Jobs' quirky little computer company had become the top retailer of music in the United States, moving more total "virtual" units than any physical distributor was moving "real" units.
The twin digital onslaught of pirated tracks and legally downloaded MP3s quite literally leveled album sales, which are now barely half of what they were 10 years ago. The established infrastructure was devastated. Even storied musical institutions such as Tower Records—not to mention countless mom-and-pop operations—were among the casualties. Tom Ewing, writing for the music website pitchfork.com, notes, "The Internet [has] reinstated the single track as the standard unit of musical currency."
In other words, it's 1960 again! But with much cooler gadgets for consumers and gloomier sales predictions for producers.
Elio Leoni-Sceti, the CEO of EMI Music, said of Apple's pioneering music advances, "The iPod/iTunes phenomenon transformed the face of the music business. It was so successful because it was a response to a question asked to consumers, 'What would you like to do when you are experiencing music?' And the answer was, 'I want to have all my music available, I want to have it in a way that doesn't require a big piece of equipment for me to listen to it, I want it to be single tracks and not albums.'"
Breaking Apart the Iceberg
While technology was undermining the music industry's established system of acquiring, producing and selling music, it was simultaneously elevating music's influence on the culture. The same software and hardware that's humbled corporate giants has made it possible for the rest of us to sample and experience more varieties of the musical experience than ever before.
According to writer and former Berlin club DJ Tim Mohr, "We're living in the most exciting moment in the history of music—a time when listeners have unlimited access to music even if they live in a two-bit village in Siberia, a time when musicians can record for virtually nothing and distribute their music anywhere on the planet for literally nothing, all of which has led to a completely unparalleled and inconceivably rich and diverse golden age open to any and all. … The amazing thing about this decade is that it became totally routine to listen to a Peruvian trip-hop act, a British rapper, a Hungarian psych-pop combo, a Berlin electro artist and a maudlin crooner from Gothenberg, Sweden, one right after the next, and without needing to have a trainspotter's knowledge of the scenes in any of those places—or even a specialty record store."
If the Internet opens up the possibility to experience music from anywhere, it also opens up a virtual time-traveling portal that enables you to find music from anywhen. Says New York Times reporter Jon Pareles, "Rare is the cultural artifact—hit single, out-of-print imported album, old or new live performance (and for that matter, cult movie or TV show or fine-art masterpiece)—that isn't accessible somewhere online, legally or not. Google a song, and you can probably listen to it whole within seconds."
iTunes. Songza. Pandora. Slacker. Last.fm. The legal reincarnation of Napster. Radical, instant availability now characterizes the Internet's music paradigm. Its side effect? Fragmentation.
The more we track down old tunes and add them to our personalized playlists, the more we choose to live in a private world of our own creation—in my case, one insulated by guitar-heavy '80s hits and CCM hair-band obscurities. Having a functionally infinite number of musical choices a mouse click or two away means I'm much less likely to experience music in any sort of communal sense. Instead of sharing a cultural collaboration, we're now inflating and retreating into our own personal bubbles.
Is that self-centered and narcissistic in a my playlist is my playlist sort of way? Or might it protect us from undue participation in messy "cultural" creations?
Yes, to both questions. Though when it comes to forgoing such phenomena as 'N Sync or Eminem (for very different reasons), I think we can all list a little to starboard. As music—along with TV, movies and games—increasingly become personal preferences instead of dictated norms, we're losing a sense of cultural cohesion. And we're simultaneously able to make more healthy choices.
This disintegration of the so-called mainstream, by the way, also allows for wilder extremes to exist as bands play to variations and deviations rather than the core. And, indeed, a look at the decade's top performers reveals an eclectic list, from the already referenced rough rapper Eminem to country stalwart Tim McGraw to pop problem child Britney Spears to hard-alternative survivors Linkin Park to R&B-infused rapper Nelly to old-school rockers Creed to business man-hip-hopper Jay-Z to … The Beatles.
Xenogenesis
Clearly, I don't have to go out on a limb or gamble away any professional credibility to predict that the music of the '10s (Teens? Ones?) will look nothing at all like the music of '50s, '70s or '90s—thanks to the '00s. And what that means, if the '00s are any indication at all, is that as fans, we will all have to take a whole lot more responsibility for our choices. You may be the very first among your peer group to stumble across some new sound, song or band. And so you'll be the one who has to carefully listen for clues about what a particular artist values:
What do they think is important?
What do they suggest is true? Good? Normal and acceptable?
What do they make you want to think about? And do?
Listening with discernment, something that Plugged In has taught since its inception—in the '80s—will be that much more important going forward. We won't be able to cover everything … because in music's brave new digital world we might not have even heard of your favorite.
Musical Decades: The Techie 2000s
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Musical Decades: The Revolutionary 1960s
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