Verified
iTunes Store
Ten billion songs sold, and the Beatles arrive
The iTunes Store was the centre of legal digital music in 2010: it passed ten billion songs sold in February, iTunes 10 arrived in September with the...
musicitunesapple
Section 3
Music
The MP3 decade's last act: iTunes ruled downloads, LimeWire was shut down by a court, Spotify was still a European invite, and Pandora, Grooveshark and Last.fm shaped how people discovered songs.
Top songs and albums of 2010
| # | Name | Artist / note | Preview |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kesha: Tik TokKesha | Kesha | |
| 2 | Lady Gaga: Bad RomanceLady Gaga | Lady Gaga | |
| 3 | Justin Bieber: Baby (feat. Ludacris)Justin Bieber featuring Ludacris | Justin Bieber featuring Ludacris | |
| 4 | Lady Gaga: Telephone (feat. Beyoncé)Lady Gaga featuring Beyoncé | Lady Gaga featuring Beyoncé | |
| 5 | OK Go: This Too Shall Pass (Rube Goldberg machine)OK Go, directed by James Frost and Syyn Labs | OK Go, directed by James Frost and Syyn Labs | |
| 6 | The biggest songs of 2010Various artists | Various artists | |
| 7 | Albums of 2010: Recovery, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, The SuburbsEminem; Kanye West; Arcade Fire | Eminem; Kanye West; Arcade Fire |
Previews are 30-second clips from Apple's public iTunes Search API, loaded only when you ask. In 2010, iTunes charged 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29 per song.
Where music lived in 2010
- Verified
LimeWire
The P2P client a court shut down in October 2010
LimeWire was the file-sharing program of a generation: a green-and-grey Gnutella client full of misnamed MP3s, fake files and viruses. On 26 October...
musiclimewirep2p
- Supported
Bandcamp
Name your price
Bandcamp gave independent artists a simple page to stream and sell their music, including "name your price" downloads in any format from MP3 to FLAC....
musicbandcampindie
- Supported
Grooveshark
Any song, on demand, free, and legally doomed
Grooveshark let anyone stream almost any song on demand, free, from a slick Flash interface, because users uploaded the tracks themselves. It was...
musicgroovesharkstreaming
- Supported
Hype Machine
The MP3 blog aggregator
Hype Machine tracked hundreds of MP3 blogs and let you stream whatever they had just posted, with a Popular chart that could break a band. In 2010 it...
musicmp3 blogshype machine
- Supported
Last.fm
Scrobble everything you play
Last.fm recorded ("scrobbled") every track you played in iTunes, Winamp or your iPod and turned it into charts, recommendations and neighbours with...
musiclast.fmscrobbling
- Supported
Pandora
Type a band, get a radio station
Pandora's Music Genome Project turned any song or artist into a personalised radio station with thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Free listening was...
musicpandoraradio
- Supported
Rdio
Skype's founders try music streaming in America
Rdio, from Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, launched in the US and Canada in August 2010 as a subscription streaming service with a...
musicrdiostreaming
- Supported
SoundCloud
Waveforms and timed comments
SoundCloud, founded in Berlin in 2007, was becoming the place for producers and DJs to share tracks in 2010. Its orange waveform player, with...
musicsoundcloudproducers
- Verified
Spotify
The European streaming service Americans could not get
In 2010 Spotify was available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands, often by invitation, with a free ad-supported...
musicspotifystreaming
Players, MP3s and ringtones
- ProductVerified
iPod nano (6th generation)
A tiny touchscreen square that people wore as a watch
The 2010 iPod nano dropped the click wheel and video camera for a 1.5-inch multitouch square with a clip, the size of a postage stamp. Watch-strap...
ipodapplemusic player
- ProductVerified
iPod touch (4th generation)
An iPhone 4 without the phone, and the teenager's first iOS device
The September 2010 iPod touch borrowed the iPhone 4's Retina display, A4 chip and FaceTime camera, starting at $229. For millions of teenagers it was...
ipodappleios
- TechnologySupported
Ringtones and ringback tones
The $2.99 ringtone business in its last big years
Ringtones were still a multi-billion-dollar business in 2010, sold by carriers and services like Myxer and Jamster, and Myxer was one of Google's...
ringtonesmusicmobile
- PersonVerified
Justin Bieber
Sixteen, discovered on YouTube, and the most-searched person of 2010
Justin Bieber released My World 2.0 in March 2010, became the youngest solo male act to top the Billboard 200 in 47 years, and had the most-viewed...
personjustin bieberpop
- PersonSupported
Lady Gaga
The most-followed person on Twitter, the meat dress, Bad Romance
Lady Gaga was the biggest pop star of 2010: Bad Romance and Telephone ruled YouTube, she became the first person to reach 10 million Facebook fans...
personlady gagapop
- CultureEditorial
MP3 culture
Ripping CDs, LimeWire folders, mislabelled tracks and the 4 GB iPod
In 2010 music was files: ripped from CDs, downloaded from LimeWire or torrents, bought from iTunes, traded on USB sticks, and organised (badly) in...
mp3musicipod
Music events of 2010
- MusicVerified
iTunes Store passes 10 billion songs sold
Apple announced the ten-billionth song download from the iTunes Store, cementing it as the world's largest music retailer in the last years before streaming.
- MusicVerified
Apple launches iTunes 10 with Ping, new iPods and the $99 Apple TV
Apple's music event introduced Ping, a social network inside iTunes that flopped, a touchscreen iPod nano, an iPod touch with cameras, and a tiny second-generation Apple TV.
- MusicVerified
LimeWire is shut down by a federal court
A permanent injunction won by the record labels forced LimeWire to disable its file-sharing software, ending the most popular P2P client of the MP3 era.
- MusicVerified
The Beatles arrive on iTunes
After years of negotiation, the Beatles catalogue went on sale on the iTunes Store, with Apple's homepage devoted to the band for the day.
No music files are hosted here. Songs are described from their documented history; previews come from Apple's public API under its terms.
