The Most Important Music Moments of the Decade

“Rolling Stone” has a list of the 50 most important “music moments” of the past decade . . . and it’s a mix of legitimately influential happenings, changes in the industry, and shameless viral sensations.

Here are 20 highlights from the list, in chronological order:

1.  November of 2010:  The Beatles finally put their music on iTunes.

2.  March of 2011:  13-year-old Rebecca Black releases her viral hit “Friday“.  “Fun, fun, fun, fun . . . kickin’ in the front seat, sittin’ in the back seat.  Gotta make my mind up.  Which seat can I take?”  (huh?)

3.  July of 2011:  Spotify makes its U.S. debut.  It now has 248 million global users.

4.  April of 2012:  A hologram of Tupac Shakur “performs” at Coachella.

5.  Winter of 2012:  Psy’s viral hit “Gangnam Style” explodes on the Internet.

6.  Winter of 2013:  The “Frozen” soundtrack smashes all expectations, and earns an Oscar for its title track “Let It Go”.

7.  Summer of 2014:  Canadian teenager Shawn Mendes gets half a billion views on Vine with six-second covers of Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran songs.

8.  September of 2014:  U2 suddenly gave half a billion people unsolicited downloads of “Songs of Innocence” on their iTunes accounts.

9.  November of 2014:  Taylor Swift abruptly pulled her entire catalog from Spotify, in a protest against their free tier.  She returned in 2017.

10.  March of 2015:  A jury decides that Robin Thicke ripped off Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up”.

11.  March of 2015:  James Corden and Mariah Carey do the very first “Carpool Karaoke”.

12.  July of 2015:  Album releases move to Friday.

13.  April of 2016:  The death of Prince shocks his fans, and puts the future of his vaults of music in jeopardy.

14.  June of 2016:  The Grammys vote to include streaming-only albums.

15.  January of 2017:  “Despacito” sweeps the globe without a word of English.

16.  March of 2017:  Future unseats his own #1 album with another #1.

17.  July of 2018:  Cardi B is the first female rapper to score two #1 hits.

18.  January of 2019:  The app TikTok finished 2018 with 1 billion downloads.

19.  March of 2019:  Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” goes viral.

20.  July 2019 to present:  Taylor Swift’s public fight with Scooter Braun and her old label boss over her master recordings.

(RollingStone.com has the whole list.)