The Minds Behind Music’s Biggest Tech Advances in the Last 10 Years

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.

Since his childhood days in Stockholm, Daniel Ek has been obsessed with the worlds of music and technology. He took up guitar at age 5, and began teaching himself to write code shortly thereafter; in high school, swept up in the dot-com boom of the late ’90s, he raked in thousands of pounds a month designing and hosting websites from his school’s computer lab. By his early 20s, Ek was an engineering school dropout, a self-made millionaire, and at a total loss as to what the hell he wanted to do with his life. When Ek began development for Spotify in 2006, along with co-founder Martin Lorentzon, he sought to merge his two obsessions into one service. What started as a way to re-invigorate their passion for their careers quickly evolved into what many saw as the music industry’s last hope for survival. Now, Ek’s considered by many to be “the most important man in music.”​

The platform incorporated the user-friendliness of iTunes, the wily forward-thinking of Napster, the monetization potential of Pandora, and the social networking of Facebook, all in one package, allowing subscribers to access its massive music database for a reasonable fee and provide royalties to the artists themselves. You can access the database without a paid subscription, but it made the service much more attractive by removing advertisements and allowing users to download music for offline listening. And instead of working around the major labels, Ek approached the music industry giants directly, getting permission to access their artist’s music after years of persuasion; today Spotify has licensing deals with Warner, Universal, EMI, and Sony—the world’s largest music labels. The platform positioned itself as the music industry’s one shot at revival, as record sales have taken a nosedive over the last decade, and if Sweden is any indication, it could be just that. As of 2012, one-third of Ek’s home country had signed up for Spotify, and a quarter of those paid for premium subscriptions. According to Mark Dennis, the man in charge of Sony’s Swedish division, Spotify single-handedly stemmed a decade of plummeting revenue in 2008, accounting for 50 percent of all sales. (Ironically, Sweden had long been the piracy capital of the world prior to Spotify’s launch, home to piracy mega-site Pirate Bay since 2003.)

Of course, the artists themselves have a different perspective on the service. Spotify says it pays 70 percent of its revenue to labels (this year, that should amount to about $1 billion), but for some artists, their cut feels paltry. Record labels receive an average of less than a penny per play—that’s just going to the labels, not the artists themselves. Recently, Taylor Swift made headlines when she pulled her discography from Spotify, and she’s not the first: Bands like Coldplay and the Black Keys have banned the service from access to their albums in the past. This highlights a potential problem: The success of Spotify relies on the compliance of the labels and artists themselves. Still, there’s no question that in 2014, Spotify is synonymous with music streaming; as of May, the service has 40 million users, 10 million of whom are paid subscribers. It remains unseen whether it will be known as the solution to the music industry’s 21st century woes, or simply a new problem, but Ek remains optimistic. “I’m not an inventor,” he told Forbes in 2012. “I just want to make things better.”

Since its 2007 inception, Berlin-based music-sharing start-up SoundCloud has grown from a humble platform for and by musicians to a company approaching the billion-dollar realm. But for co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, the need for SoundCloud didn’t spring from visions of global takeover; the young Swedish artists (Ljung is a sound designer, Wahlforss an electronic musician) were simply responding to the absence of a truly collaborative online music-sharing environment. “We both came from backgrounds connected to music,” Ljung told Wired in 2009. “And it was just really, really annoying for us to collaborate with people on music—I mean simple collaboration, just sending tracks to other people in a private setting, getting some feedback from them, and having a conversation about that piece of music. In the same way that we’d be using Flickr for our photos, and Vimeo for our videos, we didn’t have that kind of platform for our music.”

SoundCloud’s features perfectly fit the needs of musicians trying to publish their art in the post-Myspace era, audiences seeking new modes of music discovery in the digital realm, and bloggers looking for simple, integrative ways to share new music. Like Myspace, SoundCloud put promotional agency into the artist’s own hands. But where tracks uploaded to Myspace were unable to reach listeners beyond the Myspace site, SoundCloud tracks are embeddable, and are able to be distributed on any number of other online platforms. For listeners, the database is limited only by the amount of music uploaded (an average of 12 hours of audio is uploaded every minute). Users are even able to comment on specific parts of the waveforms that accompany uploaded tracks, furthering the potential for organic feedback.

Of course, as the platform has transcended its humble beginnings to attract over 175 million unique monthly listeners, questions have emerged about SoundCloud’s plans for monetizing the service. Over the past year, advertisements have been introduced to the site. However, the company has yet to secure deals with major music labels like Sony. In fact, labels have expressed wariness as to how the company plans to monetize music used without permission in mixes or mash-ups. SoundCloud has established an agreement with about 60 “Premier Partners” (including Warner Music and a selection of independent labels and artists) who will receive revenue for music published on the site. But the majority of users must pay annual subscription fees (to upload over a certain amount of music, there are fees up to $135 per year) without any significant ways to monetize their own work. Still, it’s clear that SoundCloud has made great strides in creating an online music-sharing environment that truly feels communal and immediate. Said Ljung in 2013 to The Independent: “All of a sudden it feels like anything new that’s happening in the music world and audio world is happening instantly on SoundCloud, right when it’s going on.”

When Vine co-founders Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll first launched their video-sharing app in January 2013, the idea seemed a little absurd: What am I going to do with six seconds of video? Of course, naysayers had similar doubts about Twitter’s 140-character limit years before. As has become abundantly clear in the last decade, brevity goes a long way, especially in the world of online music and communication, where immediacy is key. Just as six simple words—“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn”—were enough to suggest an entire novel, the Vine app’s six-second video format has reshaped filmmaking culture, and it has started to creep into the way in which we experience and share music, too.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs in rap this past year succeeded largely because of their ability to be enjoyed in these condensed, meme-ified blasts—basically, their Vine-ability. Take OG Maco’s “U Guessed It,” which spawned countless Vine parodies and sat atop Billboard’s Twitter-based Emerging Artists chart for weeks this fall. Or consider Young Thug’s “Stoner,” which skyrocketed in popularity this year after becoming commonplace in #NaeNae dance Vines. It’s become a tool for artists to share previews of new material, tour diaries, or random jokes, creating an unprecedented new means of communication directly from artists to fans. Some people have even started crafting music specifically for the Vine format, a good promotional strategy considering that the app is a social network as much as it is a video platform. And it works, too: This six-second Vine rap made a more lasting impression on me than many full-length songs this year. “A post on Vine takes you there,” Hofmann told The New Yorker in 2013, a few months after the official launch. “You feel like you were there. Whatever somebody’s trying to say with their post on Vine—the addition of sound, the colors are better, it moves—it feels like it’s happening in real life.”

Maybe it’s that descriptive efficiency that’s made Vine so effective in building a rapper’s buzz in 2014, or maybe it’s just the ease in which Vine allows anyone to jump-start their 15 minutes of fame. After all, all you need is a smartphone and a knack for cleverness. And according to the founders, the freedom that comes from this ease of use has contributed to Vine’s unpredictable trajectory, from quirky filmmaking app to cultural force. “Vine is uniquely democratic and a level playing field in video that’s just not been there, and there’s clearly a thirst for that in this generation,” Kroll told The Guardian. “Video is the most intimate medium for communication. I think that these users feel that they know each other just by watching each other, and you see many of them meet and collaborate openly together.”

“Rich off a mixtape, got rich off a mixtape,” Drake crowed on “Underground Kings,” a cut off of 2012’s Take Care, and he wasn’t exaggerating. So Far Gone (2009)—generally regarded as one of the most game-changing mixtape releases of the last decade—launched Drake from Wheelchair Jimmy to one of the most influential rappers of the 2010s; for a free release, it experienced unprecedented success on the Billboard Hot 100 (“Best I Ever Had,” the tape’s first single, peaked at No. 2 and charted for 24 weeks straight). It’s still available for free download on DatPiff, where it’s been certified diamond (signifying over a million downloads).

It’s impossible to imagine the last decade of rap music without considering the influence of DatPiff, the reigning site for free mixtapes, launched in 2005 by founder and CEO Marcus Frasier, who’s now 30. Then 21, Bronx-born Frasier was a professional programmer who would pick up mixtapes from vendors on Canal Street; to save himself the hassle of carting around physical CDs, he developed a site to upload and stream his own music. The idea caught on; in 2008, Frasier switched DatPiff to user-based uploading, along the lines of YouTube. He instituted a method of audio fingerprinting in order to prohibit uploading pirated material. Since then, the site has been crucial to the evolution of rap as an industry and as an art form. As record labels have floundered over the last decade, free mixtapes have become essential to kick-starting a rap career (think Nicki Minaj’s Beam Me Up Scotty, Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, Wale’s The Mixtape About Nothing, or Meek Mill’s Dreamchasers series, in addition to So Far Gone), or tiding over fan bases in between retail releases (like Rick Ross’ Rich Forever, or Lil Wayne’s aptly titled Sorry 4 the Wait). Those tapes—some of the most popular and influential rap releases of the last decade—are all still available on the site. And it’s unlikely that they would have had the same reach without DatPiff as a platform.

Though DatPiff’s been integral to the careers of some of rap’s biggest artists, it’s still an essential tool for the little guy, too. “It’s a motley crew here,” Frasier told Forbes in 2011. “We have the big artists like Lil Wayne and 50 Cent, but we also have smaller labels and even popular artists on our site that have no label. Everyone has a chance to build a following.”

YouTube has yet to hit its 10th birthday, and it already feels impossible to reflect on the experience of music in the 21st century without it.

The site was founded in 2005 by Steven Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. At the time, they worked at PayPal; Chen and Karim had met studying computer science in college. The trio has conflicting stories as to the idea’s conception. Karim has said that YouTube’s inspiration came from searching (in vain) for a clip of Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction.” Hurley and Chen claimed that the idea originated as a video-based online dating service. Either way, the user-submitted video-sharing website exploded. Less than two years after Karim uploaded the first video (a recording of himself at the San Diego zoo, titled “Me at the zoo,” now exceeding 16.6 million plays), it was bought by Google in late 2006 for a whopping $1.65 billion.

It was a worthy investment. Since then, YouTube has been no less than crucial in the last decade of music, as an industry and as an experience. YouTube video streams have become their own currency; in many regards, they’re as essential to an artist’s success as record sales, and at this point, they’re more significant than radio plays. In early 2013, Billboard announced that they were officially factoring YouTube data into chart rankings. “The Billboard charts, especially the Hot 100, have always served to reflect the most popular songs in the country, based on the ways fans are consuming music," Billboard director of charts Silvio Pietroluongo said. "There is no denying the impact that YouTube has today on music and popular culture. The inclusion of this type of interactive data to the formulas of the Hot 100, Streaming Songs, and our many genre song charts is a perfect and natural complement to our varied data sources, assuring that the Billboard charts are the most accurate gauge of song popularity." When Nicki Minaj’s cheeky “Anaconda” video broke the record this August for most YouTube views in 24 hours (19.6 million, beating Miley Cyrus’s 19.3 million for 2013’s “Wrecking Ball” video), it felt like a definitive statement of success in a year where, thus far, only one album has gone platinum. And for better or worse, 2012’s ubiquitous crossover hit “Gangnam Style” would have been unfathomable without YouTube—it recently surpassed 2 billion views, causing the platform to literally upgrade its view counter.

As revolutionary as Twitter has been since its launch in 2006 (at times, literally—the 2009-10 Iranian election protests have been dubbed the “Twitter Revolution” thanks to the social networking service’s crucial role in the uprising), it never quite managed a successful foray into the music industry. Though artists have naturally figured out how to use the micro-blogging platform as a promotional tool (as anyone spammed by daily “check out my mixtape” tweets is well aware), Twitter metrics have yet to factor into the Billboard charts, a la YouTube, and though it launched an iPhone app called Twitter Music to little fanfare in 2013, it made few attempts to ingratiate itself into the music industry.

That changed in 2013, when former Def Jam executives and Warner Music colleagues Lyor Cohen, Kevin Liles, and Todd Moscowitz announced their new label (or rather, their “content company”) 300, an offshoot of Atlantic Records. The name, said Cohen, was in reference to the 300 Spartans who fought thousands of Persian soldiers in the legendary Battle of Thermopylae (you know, from that one movie): “It was a battle that changed the way wars are fought. These guys found that if you were well synchronized, strategic, loyal with great planning and preparedness, you could do much more with less and be highly effective.” Essentially, the label aims to restore the relevance of the record label proper, in an era where the Internet has bullied labels increasingly closer to obsolescence. Their strategy? To work with the changing times, not against them. Backed by Google and partnered with Twitter, 300 has full access to data from self-publishing platforms like YouTube and unreleased data from Twitter, providing an unprecedentedly direct, efficient finger to the pulse of what’s hot.

If it works, 300 is set to revolutionize the role of the 21st century A&R, reinvigorate the record label as a sustainable concept, promote grassroots artists with legitimate fan bases, and provide a clearer, more accurate understanding of what’s actually cool, not what some wheezing, out-of-touch record executive presumes will pop off. And from the looks of the label’s current roster, they’re off to a good start: Since its launch, 300 has signed deals with intriguing underdogs including Migos, Shy Glizzy, RiFF RAFF, and (at least for a while) Young Thug. If nothing else, 300 will be a valuable experiment in reconciling old standards with new technology. As it stands, though, it seems poised for success, in part thanks to its industry-vet co-founders’ conviction. “We’re deep believers in the record business,” Moscowitz told Billboard upon its launch last year. “And we feel artists should also be rewarded for the risks they take.”

If you’ve been paying attention, then you’ve watched Beats Pills (a portable, pill-shaped Bluetooth speaker that was unveiled in 2012 by Beats Electronics) thoroughly and uncannily ingratiated into the very essence of the mainstream music video. The speakers have been prominently featured in some of the most notable videos of the last couple years: think Miley Cyrus’s much-discussed “We Can’t Stop,” Robin Thicke’s irrepressible “Blurred Lines,” or Nicki Minaj’s “Pills N Potions” (the blatant Beats product placement in the latter sparked a theory that the song’s title itself was a reference). It’s not a conspiracy, but rather a marketing strategy by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, long-time music industry veterans and founders of the super-savvy electronics company whose headphones and speakers are marketed under the brand name Beats by Dr. Dre.

And for those who are cynical about its blatant product placement strategies, flashy branding deals, and consumer-focused language, one might consider that they’ve managed to seemingly keep the music video industry afloat in the 2010s. Since launching the company in 2008, Beats has become ubiquitous, and if their dominance of the headphone and speaker market seems surprising, consider that the company is now a division of Apple, the masters of ubiquity in consumer electronics. This past August, Apple acquired Beats for a cool $3 billion, the largest acquisition in the company’s history, making Dr. Dre hip-hop’s first billionaire.

By leaning so heavily on celebrity endorsements and music video and commercial product placement for Beats’ success, the company has been called overrated by audiophiles. But Dre and Iovine insist that the company was established to help the music industry, not hurt it. “You’ve got to be lucky enough to identify a problem where you think you can help,” Iovine told Inc. Magazine this year. Conceiving Beats with Dre as early as 2006, Iovine identified two problems: piracy’s contribution to the decline of record sales, and the insufficient audio quality of the ubiquitous Apple earbuds. “Dre told me, ‘Man, it’s one thing that people steal my music. It’s another thing to destroy the feeling of what I’ve worked on.’” Though skeptics questioned who would drop hundreds of dollars on Beats headphones when they could get the Apple earbuds for free, Iovine remained convinced: “I was like, ‘Bad audio is free.’ When you believe in something, the last thing you say to yourself is, ‘Well, no one’s doing this, so there’s no reason to do it.’” Their risk paid off. In the years since, Beats has come to control 70 percent of the headphones market, has launched its own subscription-based music streaming service, and has even brokered a deal with Chrysler to incorporate Beats-branded sound systems in its vehicles.