Long before real estate and Wall Street collapsed, the music industry was already swooning. Executives were in a panic as consumers deserted the megastores and stayed home to download files illegally. But even as the biggest recording labels endured wrenching pain, a small label in North Carolina existed in a parallel universe: a topsy-turvy world where advances stretched into the four figures, where successful artists routinely got paid, where feasible budgets and modest revenues made the business of making music something resembling a traditional enterprise.

For 20 years, Merge Records, based in Chapel Hill, has been one of the favorite independent rock-music labels in the U.S., a home to such artistically cherished artists as Magnetic Fields, the Arcade Fire, Lambchop, Spoon and M. Ward. It's no coincidence that its founders, Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance (pictured), were musicians before they were label execs. Singer-guitarist McCaughan and bassist Ballance comprised half of a hard-driving quartet called Superchunk, a favorite among critics and fans who followed the indie-rock stampede of the 1990s that was set off by Nirvana.

Was it really just a year ago? Was it really just September of 2008 when several of our august financial institutions, already teetering, abruptly toppled, proving they weren't too big to fail? The whole world was wincing, but one group refused to panic: visual artists.

In the past 12 months, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, even graffiti artists have addressed the unfolding economic calamity with anger, humor, bemusement, emotion -- and above all, striking imagery.

Six years ago, a young memoirist named James Frey smacked the rarefied literary world with A Million Little Pieces, a down-and-dirty memoir of addiction and recovery whose hard-boiled prose spurted his blood and broken teeth into startled readers' cappuccinos. As he threw elbows at popular peers like Dave Eggers -- "I hope I'm a bullet in the heart of that bullshit," Frey told The New York Observer in early 2003 -- Random House imprint Doubleday ordered a confident first printing of 50,000 copies. "Mr. Frey said he originally shopped the book as a work of fiction," the Observer reported, "but Ms. [Nan] Talese and Co. declined to publish it as such."

As a memoir, A Million Little Pieces stormed the august New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction. And then things really got shocking -- for James Frey.

No media corporation is immune to today's advertising downturn, and Clear Channel Communications, an immense and fearsome force in radio, is no exception. A radio conglomerate in business since 1972, Clear Channel, based in San Antonio, Texas, seemed invincible back in 1996, when new regulations allowed it to snap up multiple stations in many markets. Today, however, company fortunes have fallen so fast that it's said to be weighing a prepackaged bankruptcy.

Though it spent its first two decades as a sleepy owner of stations mostly in the Southwest, Clear Channel exploded across the nation after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 relaxed station-ownership restrictions. A glance at Clear Channel's current roster reveals a still mighty empire that encompassed some 900 stations, controlling much of the dial in markets great (11 stations in Los Angeles) and small (eight stations in Huntington, West Virginia). No question Clear Channel seemed invincible when private-equity firms Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners acquired it less than a year ago, in a leveraged buyout, for $27 billion.

Reasonable minds may disagree on whether The New York Times is the finest newspaper in the country. Most of us, however, would at least allow that it has entrenched itself, over more than a century and a half of publishing, as our national newspaper of record. Anything that reflects a city as complex as New York -- or a country as complex as the United States -- is necessarily awash in contradiction. Whether you revere its high-minded conscience or despise its patrician snobbery, it's nearly impossible to imagine America -- let alone Manhattan -- without the Times.

Yet we may have to. If we've learned one thing over the past two years, it's that there's no big institution too big or too institutional to fail -- even the New York Times Co. (NYT) is vulnerable. Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Chrysler, GM -- each time another one collapses, we hold our breath, transfixed like horrified citizens standing under a tottering skyscraper. The glowering face of Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, said it all last October, as he testified with uncomprehending rage before Congress about his capsized bank. Lehman Brothers? Who's next? The New York Times? No. Never. Well ... perhaps?

TiVo. iPod. Prius. For years, global corporations' marketing teams and branding firms have had a bit of fun coming up with their own made-up words, leaving their dictionaries in the drawer. Making up words for the global market is so much fun -- and such big business -- that MacArthur "genius" grant winner Colson Whitehead even wrote a novel about it. Google (GOOG) went a little meta on the trend, whether inadvertently or deliberately, by corrupting "googol," a word coined in 1938 by the nine-year-old nephew of an American mathematician who wanted a snappy term for his concept of 10 the power of 100.

Rock veteran Dean Wareham remembers exactly where he was when he witnessed the asteroid that was coming to kill the dinosaurs.

At a party one night in 2001, someone turned off the CD player and fired up a computer running a music file sharing program. As the founder of the influential indie-rock bands Luna and Galaxie 500, Wareham had already survived as a starving artist. But when he heard his first digital riffs from Napster, he realized his entire industry would soon have to figure out a new economic model.

And today, it still does, Wareham told me in an extended interview.

On Sunday evening, the blogosphere swirled with rumors that Amazon.com had dumped all books with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender content from its ranking system, rendering thousands of books nearly impossible to find. However, Nathaniel Frank just chuckled. Maybe that was an odd reaction for the author of a new book that was itself caught in the scandal's net, Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America. But at least now he knew it wasn't his iPhone's fault.

Amazon fixed its "glitch" on Monday, calling it an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error." Meanwhile, for Frank, a history professor at New York University and the University of California–Santa Barbara, coverage of the incident may have raised his book's profile. In effect, Amazon's "glitch" became an unplanned cog in the book's publicity machine -- just as visible as the book's review in The New York Times and the author's guest slot on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

As he explains in this DF interview, Frank (who, in full disclosure, is a college acquaintance) may never learn for sure whether, or how, the "glitch" affected the sales of Unfriendly Fire. It can be fun guessing, though.