With the actual recording and production of music, as with everything else, the last 14 years have been less about completely new innovations as they’ve been about the existing technology become better, and more affordable. With music sales cratering and traditional avenues of income shrinking, there are fewer and fewer high-end studios with cutting-edge technology. But the ability to make something sound not just good, but polished and professional, from a home studio has become cheaper and easier with each passing year. Justin Vernon, better known as Bon Iver, can lock himself in a cabin in the woods and create his entire critically acclaimed 2007 album For Emma, Forever Ago. Of course, you still can’t polish a turd—if a vocalist or musician lacks talent or creativity, if the room they’re recording in is acoustically dead, there’s no plug-in you can buy that fixes that. But more and more, there are ways around what would’ve been roadblocks to making a hit record, or a good record, in the past.