It has been a decade of vast change in the music industry.

Rock stars were made on television and in living rooms. The iPod eliminated the need for a physical record collection, and the music industry fruitlessly fought digital music. For not much money, digital devices now allow us to create the soundtrack of life in real time.

From one perspective, the first decade of the new millennium was the worst in popular music since the advent of rock 'n' roll: labels dropping bands left and right, radio playlists consolidating down to nothing, lost revenues and lost jobs. On the other hand, it could be the most revolutionary decade in pop music since, well, ever.

Online music sites such as Pandora exposed the curious listener to a global spectrum of music that was never available at a brick-and-mortar store. Genres bent, combined, schismed, deflated and exploded; the difference between country and pop, rap and metal, rock and folk never seemed smaller, but the amount of music available made it impossible to hear everything that mattered. Consequently, more mattered than ever before.

Cheaper, more powerful digital audio software put the power of recording studios in the hands of garage bands, so that just about anyone could record an album and release it. The downside: Just about anyone could record and album and release it.

Here are the best recordings of the past decade by artists who actually knew what they were doing.

1. 'In Rainbows' (ATO, 2007), Radiohead
Reasonable people might argue that "Kid A" or "Hail to the Thief" were superior albums artistically, but this one wins top prize not only for its musical merit (basically completing the group's reinvention of progressive rock) but for the way in which it was released. Adopting a pay-what-you-like policy, the group offered the entire album as a download two weeks before they even had a retail distributor. They made millions, and record executives everywhere called it a fluke. Radiohead signaled the future of music retail.

2. 'Devils & Dust' (Columbia, 2005), Bruce Springsteen
In a decade that saw Bruce put out no less than five albums of new material, it was his quietest work that resonated most. "The Rising," "Magic," and "Working on a Dream" were all powerful, but also overproduced and unnecessarily dense. "Devils & Dust" boasted songs that not only added to Springsteen's modern legacy as much as those on "Nebraska," but showed songs that told small stories were now better than his anthems ("Outlaw Pete?" Are you serious?). Like the stories of the uncertain father on "Long Time Comin'" or the scared soldier on the title cut, they search deeper and cut cleaner.

3. 'Z' (ATO, 2005), My Morning Jacket
The Southern indie rock giants had made several albums of haunting, sprawling music before they finally got a hold of their propensity for aimless noodling and cavernous reverb and put out something focused. "Z" benefited from injections of blue-eyed soul ("Wordless Chorus"), smoldering Allman Brothers-style jamming ("Lay Low"), bouncing reggae ("Off the Record") and arena rock ("Gideon"). They smeared things a bit too thin on the follow-up, but nobody's perfect. This one came darn close though.

4. 'The Grey Album' (2004), Danger Mouse
The reason no record label can be listed is that this brilliant mash-up of Jay-Z's "Black Album" and the Beatles' "White Album" was completely illegal, unlicensed and unsanctioned by either contributing act. Thankfully, such things matter little anymore. The album makes complete sense: one of hip-hop's greatest young voices combined with the group that virtually invented every studio trick that hip-hop now rests on. Brilliant. It made Danger Mouse one of the most sought-after independent producers of his time.

5. 'Out Past the Lights' (Grace Entertainment, 2005), Ana Egge
Some albums are simply so good it almost breaks your heart when you look around and realize no one knows. Aided by longtime Ani DiFranco collaborator Jason Mercer, Egge takes the classic country of her early career and turns it on its head, with intimate and strikingly original arrangements. Fuzz bass and horns are not things you generally hear on a folk record, but this is one that resonates in so many ways that such things are quickly forgotten. The freak-folk movement is still playing catch-up.

6. 'The College Dropout' (Rocc-A-Fella, 2004), Kanye West
By the new millennium, mainstream rap needed a serious reinvention, and Kanye West proved he could lead. After giving away a career's worth of good ideas as a producer and beatmaker, it seems he kept enough for himself, something he is not afraid to say himself. "Through the Wire," with its creative altered-speed sample and massive sound crossed over beyond rap and influenced the next half-decade of pop music production, while a heavy beat like "Jesus Walks" could hold down the album from becoming a calculated stab at pop stardom, and "Breathe In Breathe Out" swung with an undeniably soulful, bluesy pulse.

7. 'Speakerboxxx/Love Below' (La Face, 2003), Outkast
"Stankonia" solidified the duo's growth from just a pair of dirty Southern rap cats to an R&B/rock/rap/soul powerhouse capable of just about anything. And they jump in here without reserve. At 39 tracks, this is a daunting one-sit listen. "Roses" cribbed early Prince but was one of the most unique and memorable singles of its time, as was the massive hit "Hey Ya!" Of the two men, it is Andre 3000 that comes out best, with his bouncing, machine gun vocal style carrying a dizzying weight.

8. 'Brighter Than Creation's Dark' (New West, 2008), Drive-By Truckers
Having lost a key songwriter in Jason Isbell the year before, the Truckers responded by putting out a sprawling double album, releasing almost every cut they could write and record in 10 days. Always more in tune with middle America than it might appear on the surface, singers Patterson Hood, Shonna Tucker and Mike Cooley unintentionally chronicled an overworked, overstressed and utterly gutted place. On the desperately searching "Righteous Path," Hood sings "I got a whole lot of debt, and a whole lot of fear…We've got messed up minds, for these messed up times." On "You and Your Crystal Meth," he recounts an epidemic that has crippled rural working-class America almost as much as perpetual deployments and foreclosures.

9. 'Heartbreaker' (Bloodshot, 2000), Ryan Adams
Long before he sobered up for the umpteenth time, Adams was cranking out tuneful country-rock at such a rate it almost seemed to cheapen his considerable, almost inexplicable talent. This was the beginning of an 11-album run during the decade. With the participation of neo-folkies David Rawlings and Gillian Welch, Adams shows a more intimate side as a performer and songwriter. He embodies the withered old farmer to such a degree on "In My Time of Need" that one wonders how many souls he carries around in a body not yet out of its 30s. His duet with Emmylou Harris on "My Sweet Carolina" stares the Gram Parsons comparisons right in the face.

10. 'Living with War' (Reprise, 2006), Neil Young
Tired of waiting for a younger act to make the ultimate statement against the war in Iraq, Young wrote, recorded, streamed and released this in about a week. Its ragged edges show, and the decision to add a 100-voice choir may have been a bad one in retrospect. But from the opening fuzz of "After the Garden" through the anguish of "Families" and the unmasked rage of "Let's Impeach the President," Young finds artistic triumph in the fact that he has nothing to risk at this point in his career and everything to gain by speaking out.

11. 'Transatlanticism' (Barsuk, 2003), Death Cab for Cutie
In a decade when the label "indie rock" became as meaningless as "alternative" did 10 years before, Death Cab was one of the few bands that mattered outside the term. Singer Ben Gibbard did things completely the wrong way if his aim was to ensure his cred among the collegiate ironic-T-shirt-and-spectacles crowd. He wrote brilliant lyrics, stirring melodies and combined crashing rock arrangements with gentle acoustic playing and electronic production. The result: not a single second of "Transatlanticism" seems wasted or designed to be cool. Every note matters, and this means that Gibbard may be the best young songwriter of the decade just ended (sorry Conor Oberst), and Death Cab could be the next Pearl Jam, a band so productive and so original for so long that the movement it sprung from is barely mentioned anymore.   

12. 'Attack & Release' (Nonesuch, 2008), The Black Keys
The idea was to make an album with Ike Turner, but the abusive old genius went and died, so the Midwestern blues duo forged ahead with an album that confused folks who had gotten used to their predictable skuzzy guitar and drum sound. Here they go for minimalist avant-soul, for lack of a better term. "I Got Mine" swings with the sex and drive of vintage Zeppelin, but "Lies" brims with the authority of a vintage Chess session decades out of time, and "So He Won't Break" channels trace amounts of The Brothers Johnson.

13. 'We'll Never Turn Back' (Anti, 2007), Mavis Staples
As one of the legendary Staple Singers, contralto Mavis sang at rallies for Martin Luther King and helped make some of the most uplifting gospel and soul music of the 1970s. Here she revisits some of the greatest songs of her Civil Rights youth, backed by the slippery folk-funk of Ry Cooder, and adds at least one new standard to the genre, "My Own Eyes." As she crests 70, Staples' voice is deeper, sandier and brimming with authority. The songs are all the more touching and convincing knowing that Mavis was one who faced jail, the dogs and the fire hoses side by side with her family all those years ago.

14. 'The Radio Tisdas Sessions' (World Village, 2001), Tinariwen
When the transcontinental polyrhythms of the Sahel combined with the sounds of Hendrix, Dire Straits, Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones emanating from cassette decks in refugee camps across norther Africa, Tinariwen was born. Creating a potent hybrid, the group has for almost 30 years been holding up the mirror of African experience to the blues. Despite being banned by both the governments of Mali and Algeria, the music reached the world with almost no modern support mechanism other than word of mouth and, finally, the Internet. For so long, the awful catchphrase of "world music" wasn't good for much more than selling coffee. Tinariwen makes music that easily defies expectations.

15. 'All That You Can't Leave Behind' (Interscope, 2000), U2
It seems U2 begins each decade at a creative peak and ends it in a vast overreach. There was the insipid earnestness of "Rattle and Hum," the cartoonish irony of "Pop" and now, amidst the worst recession in generations, Bono and the boys respond with the largest, most ostentatious stadium show ever built. But at the dawn of the new millennium, before 9/11 and Iraq derailed hope, U2 proved they were not only the biggest band in the world, but the most important as well. Beyond the ecstatic lift of "Beautiful Day," "Elevation" and "Walk On," it seemed world sympathy had finally caught up to the message the band had been living out since the mid-1980s, turning every show into a heaven-splitting affirmation.