In August 2009, JAY-Z and Beyoncé checked out a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Solange had brought them along to see the knotty indie rock band, whose third album Veckatimest, released that spring, broke their sound open enough for it to thrive in breezy outdoor spaces. Awed and confused showgoers surreptitiously filmed the superstar couple as they chatted and casually surveyed the crowd. Jay bobbed his head a little, waved a feeble hand from side to side, sipped a beer.

Soon, JAY-Z started popping up—looking puzzled but intrigued—at all manner of rock concerts. Here he is wearing a train conductor hat and trying to ignore the phone pointed at his face while taking in a Coachella set from Baltimore dream-pop duo Beach House in 2010. And here he is, perhaps most famously, wearing owlish glasses and looking like he lost his keys at a Coldplay show. With the trademark over-enthusiasm of an older person who has been introduced to a new band by a younger person, Jay enthused, publicly and at length: “What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring,” he declared, going on to say that he earnestly hoped that groups like Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors would “push” rappers to “make better music.”

Jay’s intense and sudden interest in indie rock wasn’t an isolated event; something bigger was afoot, and the early 2010s were full of these strange rumblings. Shakira covered introverted British trio the xx’s “Islands” at the UK’s massive Glastonbury Festival. Rising stars the Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar sampled Beach House, who in turn covered trap visionary Gucci Mane in concert. By 2015, a handful of indie luminaries, including Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Dirty Projectors frontman David Longstreth, had spent time working with Kanye West.

None of these scenarios would have been thinkable for indie rock bands of previous generations. Of all the upheavals in music over the last 10 years, perhaps none was broader or more permanent than the complete erasure of the borders around “indie music.” The twin financial and ideological barriers separating those two words began to collapse, brick by brick.

Where there had once been a policed border, there was now constant flow: Father John Misty was writing songs with Lady Gaga; Caroline Polachek of the synth-pop group Chairlift landed a co-write on Beyoncé’s 2014 track “No Angel”; Alex G, who in another era would have spent his career putting out sweet lo-fi valentines on tiny indie labels, played guitar for Frank Ocean; James Blake collaborated with Travis Scott; Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig co-wrote Beyoncé’s “Hold Up,” borrowing a phrase from “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a standard-bearing indie act of the 2000s that never got a call from Bey.

Like most moments of transition, this frantic entropy seemed to herald all kinds of revolutionary prospects before eventually panning out in complicated and sometimes-disappointing ways. Like so many other stories this decade, the tale of indie music going pop is equal parts corporate media consolidation and genuine grassroots aesthetic shift: By the end of the ’10s, a lucky handful found themselves breathing rarefied air, while most everyone else was faced with straitened budgets as they struggled to make a career.

The stage for indie’s move toward the mainstream was set by the industry collapse of the ’00s, spurred by a disastrous transition to digital. At the beginning of the new decade, that collapse had started to resemble freefall, and by 2011, sales were so dismal that albums were routinely breaking records for hitting the top of the charts with the lowest number of units sold.