What we now know as Music Twitter officially started on July 28, 2010, when Kanye West logged on. “Up early in the morning taking meetings in Silicone Valley,” he tweeted. Forty-eight minutes later came the correction: “Lol I spelled Silicon wrong ( I guess I was still thinking about the other type of silicone ITS A PROCESS!! : )”

He was a relatively late adopter—Katy, Kesha, Justin, and Nicki were already on; Erykah Badu had live-tweeted the birth of her son, and John Mayer had already gotten dumped by Jennifer Aniston for his Twitter addiction—but once he did, he reshaped it. Kanye had found a medium better than a blog, a talk show, or a disaster relief telethon for what he does best.

Over the next weeks and months, his follower count swelled with each enthusiastic update about his opulent life—tiny jets! fur pillows! annoying water bottles on planes! He dropped tantalizing hints about his forthcoming album, and his novel use of the short form medium soon spawned the #PredictingKanyeTweets hashtag. He was messy and gaudy, and, best of all, present. The contradiction was rich: While precious few could relate to his extravagant aphorisms, his tweets also made him feel more relatable.

As Twitter itself was rapidly approaching something close to cultural ubiquity—in late 2010, the platform claimed a 200 percent spike in users over 2009—Kanye had unlocked one of its core secrets. Social scientists called it “ambient awareness”: a potent sense of ersatz intimacy with a person that derives from immersion in a stream of their text-based micro-updates. As music writer Jonah Weiner showed in an August 2010 Slate “profile” of Kanye that used his tweets as imaginary interview responses, the rapper was doing something else new, too: bypassing the gatekeepers in lieu of a straight-from-the-source press cycle. “No, I don’t get to ask any questions, but I do get a constantly updating record of West’s thoughts, whereabouts, cravings, jokes, meals, flirtations, bon mots, and on and on,” Weiner wrote.

Kanye’s unavailability to journalists didn’t mean he was silent—he had just moved nearly all communication to his 24/7 personal news channel. In early September 2010, he posted one of his earliest stream-of-consciousness Twitter rants, recapping and repenting for his previous year of unscripted notoriety: “I’m sorry Taylor”; “If you google Asshole my face may very well pop up”; “These tweets have no manager, no publicist , no grammar checking... this is raw.” Music’s Very Online decade was born.

It’s hard to remember musical life online before Twitter knocked down the barriers separating previously isolated social groups—musicians, critics, fans, messageboarders, industry types, bored onlookers—and let their thoughts commingle in a colossal public sphere dominated by a scoreboard of follower counts, likes, and retweets (and, more recently, the dreaded “ratio”).

When Twitter was dreamed up, in fact, it was with music in mind. “This is why we built this thing! For concerts and music shows!” Noah Glass told fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2006, according to Nick Bilton’s book, Hatching Twitter. At that point, when the site had only a handful of users, Glass and Dorsey road-tested Twitter at Coachella and attempted a partnership with the 2007 VMAs. As the site grew in popularity, Bilton recounts, pop stars made pilgrimages to the company’s modest San Francisco headquarters, like when a couple of Twitter engineers “found a member of the band blink-182, half-asleep and half-drunk, pouring a small bottle of gin into a bowl of Fruity Pebbles cereal, then chowing down on breakfast.”