The most important news story of the past decade doesn't concern a specific band or genre or trend. It's the story of how music news itself has changed. Think back to the turn of the millennium: How did you find out that your favorite band had a new album coming out? Sure, the few of us with fast enough internet connections might have read about it online, but it's more likely that you read about it in a magazine, saw a poster at your local record store, or maybe, maybe heard about it from MTV News. These days, that magazine has probably folded, your local record store is now a Best Buy, and MTV just wants to show you "Hills" spin-offs. You're going to find out about that album from a music news blog or site, or even from the band themselves, via their own web portal or Twitter. And you're probably going to end up hearing that album much, much sooner than the band intended, thanks to a leak.

As the decade progressed, music news got faster and more crowded. In 2000, the news section was just a side-note to the reviews and features on Pitchfork. By 2005, we posted new stories once a day. (We even took Fridays off!) In 2009, we're updating anywhere from 10 to 20 times a day-- not to mention posting often to our Twitter feed. Music news has also become less controlled, by labels and publicists as well as by the artists themselves. Wavves has a breakdown on stage in Barcelona? People halfway across the world will hear about it as it happens, and video will pop up the next morning. Kanye divebombs Taylor Swift at the VMAs? If you haven't posted about it within three minutes, you're too late. It's a small miracle that anyone can keep up.

So let's take a breather, and a look back: The Decade in News traces the ups and downs, zigs and zags that the music Pitchfork covers has taken over the past 10 years. From Britney to Bright Eyes, from the Strokes to Vampire Weekend, from Napster to the iPhone, it's all here. And it's enough to make any band that faded from the spotlight prior to the 2000s say, "God, I'm glad the internet didn't exist when we were around." --Amy Phillips

The Go-Betweens, MBV's Kevin Shields Return, With Friends

A pair of long-dormant indie rock originators returned to the music world in 2000. The hugely influential Australian indie pop group the Go-Betweens broke up in 1998, but they reunited in 2000 and released the gorgeous comeback LP The Friends of Rachel Worth. It featured contributions from all three members of Sleater-Kinney. Go-Betweens principals Robert Forster and Grant McLennan remained together long enough to release two more albums before McLennan died suddenly of a heart attack in 2006. Meanwhile, My Bloody Valentine leader Kevin Shields had largely faded from the spotlight since his band's post-Loveless dissolution. But in 2000, he made a quiet return (if anything Shields does can be called quiet), playing on and producing Primal Scream's XTRMNTR album and touring with the band. He later worked on Evil Heat, Primal Scream's follow-up, did some work on the Lost in Translation soundtrack, and eventually reunited MBV to play some of the loudest shows anyone had ever heard. --Tom Breihan

UKG Kicks Off the Garage Continuum

The garage continuum-- arguably the most dynamic and inventive new thread of music this decade-- is barely understood in the U.S. And, at its start at least, not often respected in many music circles. But what began as UK Garage/2-Step has gone on to mutate into grime, dubstep, and, recently, funky and wonky. UKG started simply enough, as an offshoot of speed garage, an amped-up version of drum'n'bass. Eventually, the sound became more feminized, taking cues from the then-ascendant world of U.S. R&B, often adding female vocals and stripping away half of the typical four beats in a measure (hence the name "2-Step," which it soon began to be called). The result maintained the robustness of jungle and married it to the futurism and minimalism of turn-of-the-millennium American chart music (think the work of producers like Timbaland or She'kspere). Considered stylish, even sophisticated, 2-Step in London soon moved from pirate radio into fashionable clubs, where it appealed to champagne-guzzling, well-dressed crowds. It's no wonder the sound quickly got darker, turning into grime. --Scott Plagenhoef

Almost Famous, High Fidelity Take Music Dorks to Hollywood

Plenty separates William Miller, the hero of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, from Rob Gordon, the protagonist of Stephen Frears' High Fidelity. One's a teenager; one's an adult. One's a quiet and retiring type; one yammers endlessly at the camera. One has to babysit a stoned Billy Crudup, and one has to contend with a fired-up Jack Black. But both characters obsess endlessly over music, even to the detriment of their real-life relationships. Both pine inarticulately after girls. Both dress like herbs. In short, both are total music dorks. For one brief shining moment in 2000, Hollywood deemed people like us sufficiently fascinating enough to build a couple of big movies around. Interestingly, both characters end their story arcs learning that music is no substitute for real human interaction, something many of us still have yet to figure out nine years later. (Another 2000 movie protagonist, Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, actually does more music criticism than either, but he'd probably drop a chainsaw on you from the top of a staircase if you called him a dork.) --TB

January 10

Melissa Etheridge Deems David Crosby Father Material

When singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge and her partner, filmmaker Julie Cypher, decided to have children, they went to the world's greatest sperm donor: the somehow still-alive folk-rocker David Crosby. Because when you think of whose DNA you want your baby to have, you're obviously going to settle on a guy who's overweight, balding, and had his liver replaced in 1994. In January 2000, when Etheridge revealed Crosby as the biological father of their two children, the sound of heads being scratched was deafening. --TB

January 25

D'Angelo Gives World Neo-Soul Masterpiece, Then Vanishes

The late-90s genre/trend with the unfortunate tag of "neo-soul" tended more toward inoffensively slick lifestyle music than anything that would've blown Curtis Mayfield's wig back. But when he recorded his sophomore album, virtuosic Virginia rasper D'Angelo hit on a miasmic, woozy groove that somehow sustained itself for an hour-plus without breaking character long enough for anything particularly radio-friendly to escape from the murk. Even when Method Man and Redman turned up on "Left & Right", they were there for funky texture, not fill-in-the-blank name value. Voodoo felt like a soft, sexy bomb dropped on the neo-soul landscape, and none of D'Angelo's competitors ever equaled it-- though Erykah Badu came close on the same year's Mama's Gun. But then D'Angelo disappeared almost completely, only contributing the odd guest vocal in the intervening years. He was arrested several times throughout the decade, as rumors of drug addiction swirled. There is still no Voodoo follow-up. --TB

September 5

Ryan Adams Goes Solo With Heartbreaker

Following the breakup of his band Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams released his first solo record, Heartbreaker, on the Chicago alt-country label Bloodshot. The emotionally devastating album seemed to herald the arrival of a serious talent. But Gold, Adams' 2001 major-label follow-up, was muddled and bloated by comparison, though it did gain Adams some mainstream traction, particularly thanks to the anthemic "New York, York", which took on an elegiac quality following 9/11. After that, Adams went on to have an exceedingly weird decade. He dated starlets, publicly tangled with rock critics, blogged incessantly, and released more music than any sane person should attempt. More recently, he married Mandy Moore and claimed he was quitting music, which didn't really happen. --TB

September 7

Eminem Brings an Army of Shadys to the VMAs

When Eminem dropped the joke-rap bomb "The Real Slim Shady" on MTV's Video Music Awards, the mob of bleach-headed clones he brought with him seemed to underscore the song's strongest lines: "There's a million of us just like me, who cuss like me, who just don't give a fuck like me." At the time, Em's stratospheric success seemed like a game-changer: A white rapper with a titanic crossover audience as well as actual skills and credibility and the ability to scare the piss out of parents. Commentators warned that white rappers could steal rap away from black America, that Em could be rap's Elvis. Em got away with lyrical murder (literally) while most critics gave him a pass on seriously repellent homophobic and misogynist lyrics because he delivered them with such force and inventiveness. When Eminem stepped onstage at the 2001 Grammys with Elton John, it seemed like a totally inadequate olive branch, and still we didn't care because dude was on such a roll. But Em's nearly Michael Jackson-level of dominance didn't last long. After the success of his Oscar-winning 2002 film-star turn 8 Mile, Em, once one of rap's most joyous word junkies, seemed to give up entirely, swapping out actual wit for fart jokes. Eventually, he disappeared for years while struggling with addiction. When the shock-rap comeback attempt Relapse appeared 2009, it felt like little more than an aftershock. --TB

October 3

Kid A Released, Debuts at #1

Based on the worldwide hyperbolic century-end praise for 1997's OK Computer, the anticipation for the Oxford band's follow-up was astronomical. Safe to say: it delivered. I remember waiting in line at a midnight sale (remember those?) at a local Wherehouse Music (and those?!)-- and I wasn't alone. Though the album traded in Pink Floyd-style epic rock for something more insular and outlandish-- blaring horns! Aphex blips! Thom Yorke's voice trapped in an icebox!-- it still zoomed to number one in several countries including the U.S., where it sold 207,000 copies in its first week. A true triumph of art and commerce, one of several this band would pull off over the next 10 years. --Ryan Dombal

R.I.P.

• Doris Coley (singer, the Shirelles) - Aug. 2, 1941 - Feb. 4, 2000
• Christopher "Big Pun" Rios (rapper) - Nov. 9, 1971 - Feb. 7, 2000
• Jalacy "Screamin' Jay" Hawkins (blues shock-rocker) - Jul. 18, 1929 - Feb. 12, 2000
• Dennis Danell (bassist/guitarist, Social Distortion) - Jun. 24, 1961 - Feb. 29, 2000
• Ian Dury (pub/punk) - May 12, 1942 - Mar. 27, 2000
• Benjamin Orr (bassist and singer, the Cars) - Sep. 8, 1947 - Oct. 3, 2000
• Robert Earl "DJ Screw" Davis, Jr. (producer and DJ) - Jul. 20, 1971 - Nov. 16, 2000
• Kirsty MacColl (singer) - Oct. 10, 1959 - Dec. 18, 2000