The Best Music Moments of 2019

A lot has happened this year in the world of music, so we thought we'd take this opportunity to look back and highlight some of our favorite musical moments. Read more below!

Looking for the most-popular sheet music of 2019? Check out our Best of 2019 playlists, including the top titles for every instrument.


Grammy delight for Kacey

The awards season kicked off in earnest with the glitz and glamor of the Grammys in January. Along with Childish Gambino, Kacey Musgraves was the biggest winner on the night, collecting awards in each of the four categories she was nominated, including the coveted Album of the Year prize. Other winners included Ariana Grande, Dan + Shay, Brandi Carlile, Dua Lipa and Greta Van Fleet. Two of last year’s biggest movie musicals didn’t go unnoticed either with Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper’s smash hit duet “Shallow” (from A Star Is Born) winning two awards and The Greatest Showman picking up the award for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media.


I'd like to thank the Academy

The eyes of the movie world turned to the 91st Academy Awards in February. Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody won four awards, Marvel's Black Panther picked up three, and the aforementioned “Shallow” won the award for Best Original Song, with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper performing the song on the night to a standing ovation.




A diverse selection of inductees

March saw the induction of several big names into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame including Def Leppard, Janet Jackson, Radiohead, Stevie Nicks and The Cure amongst others. The latter went on to headline the Glastonbury festival three months later – 33 years since they first headlined the iconic festival. 2020 will see another 16 acts join the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, with The Dave Matthews Band, Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails among the inductees.


Woodstock at 50

Speaking of world-renowned music festivals, August saw the 50th anniversary of the iconic Woodstock music festival. While the commemorative event scheduled to take place in Columbia, Maryland was sadly cancelled, music fans enjoyed looking back on one of the most notable occasions in music history. Jimi Hendrix, The Who and The Band were among the headlining acts of the original festival.


A country rap phenomenon

If there were an award for the song which spent the longest time stuck in people’s heads over the course of a year, this surely goes to "Old Town Road" by breakthrough artist Lil Nas X. The song originally debuted at No. 19 on the Hot Country Songs chart before Billboard decided to strike the track from the ranking on the basis it did not "embrace enough elements of today’s country music." With a little help from Billy Ray Cyrus, the song went on to top the US charts for a record-breaking 19 consecutive weeks, and won the award for Musical Event of the Year in last month’s CMA Awards.




And more breakthrough artists

2019 has seen artists from both sides of the pond breakthrough to mainstream success. Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi spent seven weeks at the top of the UK charts in the early part of the year with his heartbreak ballad "Someone You Loved." Then (seven months later) managed to woo US audiences too, with the song hitting the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100.

While Billie Eilish was not an unknown entity going into 2019, the release of her debut album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? in March catapulted her into one of the biggest names in pop music. The album claimed the third-biggest streaming week of all-time for an album by a female artist in its first week and is nominated for two Grammys in February’s upcoming awards show.


A Swiftly broken record

It doesn’t feel like long ago that Taylor Swift was a breakthrough artist herself, but the recently-turned-30 star increased her career total of American Music Awards to 29 last month, surpassing Michael Jackson's previous record of 24 in the process. Swift released her seventh studio album, Lover, in August, which sold nearly half a million copies within its first day and goes up against the aforementioned WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? for the Grammy award for Best Pop Vocal Album.


Speaking of records…

While Lauren Daigle's “You Say” was released back in July 2018, its success has had a very long tail. The song recently broke the record for the longest-running No.1 title on the weekly Hot Christian Songs chart, spending an incredible 66 weeks at No.1 before Kanye West's “Follow God” knocked it off the top spot. The record was previously held by Hillsong UNITED with their song "Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)" which led for 61 weeks.




Meanwhile, in contemporary classical

2019 was a busy year for Ludovico Einaudi, who also managed to get his name in the record books. The Italian maestro announced his ambitious project Seven Days Walking, comprising seven volumes of music to be released over seven consecutive months. Day One, released in March, quickly became the fastest-streamed classical album of all time, exceeding 2 million streams on the day of release. Elsewhere in contemporary classical, Alexis Ffrench, Hauschka and Florian Christl released new music, with Ffrench’s "Bluebird" and Christl’s "Vivaldi Variation" two of the most popular solo piano works of 2019. Alexis Ffrench’s new album Dreamland is due for release in March 2020.




Disney, Disney and more Disney

2019 has been a big year for Disney (to say the least). As well as releasing new versions of classics Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King, the third installment of Disney Channel's Descendants landed, and another sequel to Pixar's ever-popular Toy Story series hit the big screen too. Not to mention new Marvel cinematic adventures (Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to boot. And if all that wasn’t enough, last month saw Disney launch their brand new streaming platform, Disney+, which has made the Disney Vault a thing of the past.

With all that said, arguably the most-anticipated Disney moment of 2019 came in November with the release of Frozen 2. The movie broke the record for the highest-grossing weekend ever for an animated film globally, and boasts another killer soundtrack from Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez with songs such as "Into the Unknown" and "Show Yourself" destined to become Disney classics.




The movie music doesn’t end there

As well as the aforementioned Disney releases, music fans have been able to celebrate the music of three iconic artists with the releases of Rocketman, Yesterday and Blinded by the Light this year. Rocketman is the epic musical story about the breakthrough years of Elton John (who is currently in the middle of his 300+ date Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour), expertly portrayed by Taron Egerton and featuring all of Elton John’s best-loved hits. Yesterday is a hilarious romantic comedy which imagines a world where The Beatles don’t exist. This nostalgic fantasy also serves as a reminder of just how phenomenally impressive the Beatles’ catalog really is. And lastly, the Bruce Springsteen comedy-drama Blinded by the Light tells the story of a British teenager whose life is transformed after he is introduced to the music of “The Boss.”


From screen to stage

2019 has brought a number of Broadway success stories, including three notable screen-to-stage adaptations in the shape of Beetlejuice, Mean Girls (check out our insightful interviews with Eddie Perfect and Jeff Richmond, on that note) and Tootsie. Across the pond, the early part of the year saw Come from Away and Waitress make their West End debuts to great acclaim. And Pasek & Paul’s hit musical Dear Evan Hansen joined them, opening last month to rave reviews.




Behind the scenes at Sheet Music Direct

Since merging our two global communities and launching our PASS sheet music subscription last year, we haven’t rested on our laurels! We’ve been fine-tuning our website and app, making vast improvements to help you find and discover the music you want. We’ve also expanded our subscription offering by adding over 30,000 guitar tabs and chord sheets to PASS, not to mention the thousands of new arrangements we add every month. Stay tuned for even more exciting things to come in the new year!


That’s all...for now!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from your friends at Sheet Music Direct. We look forward to bringing you more great sheet music throughout 2020.


Explore the best sheet music of 2019 from pop, movies & TV, Broadway, Christian and more, available to download and play instantly. Powered by Hal Leonard, the world's largest sheet music publisher.

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