The 2000s is the decade the recorded music business stopped working the way it had for fifty years. Everything in this category happened against a backdrop of collapsing revenue, panicked lawsuits, and an audience that had quietly stopped agreeing to pay.
File sharing arrived at the very start of the decade and the industry's response was to sue its own customers, which went about as well as you would expect. The legal download store that eventually stabilised things did so on terms set by a computer company rather than a label, and it unbundled the album in the process. For the first time in decades you could buy the one song you wanted and ignore the rest.
The effect on the music itself was subtle but real. Singles mattered more. Album sequencing mattered less. And an act's ability to be discovered without radio or a marketing budget suddenly became a genuine commercial factor, which is a large part of why Indie Rock is the second-largest genre in this category.
The early years of the decade produced a wave of guitar bands built on deliberately unfashionable virtues: short songs, small venues, visible amplifiers, an aesthetic that looked like a reaction to the previous decade's production values. Music blogs and early social networks turned out to be extraordinarily good at spreading this kind of act, and for a few years it looked like the dominant form. It was the last time guitar music occupied that position.
Pop-Punk and Nu-Metal both sit in this category too, and both are worth taking more seriously than their reputations allow. Between them they sold vast quantities of records to teenagers who have since grown up and become defensive about it, which is generally a sign that something real was going on.
Pop is still the biggest genre here. The teen pop machine that had ramped up in the late nineties ran at full speed into the new decade, and the production behind it was often extraordinary, drawing on Scandinavian songwriting craft and increasingly sophisticated studio technique. A lot of the records dismissed at the time as disposable have aged remarkably well.
This is a comfortable category for most players, because it sits at the point where a lot of people's music memory is densest. If you are struggling elsewhere, start here.
The 2000s category in Alphabetish contains 93 acts. The genres best represented are Pop (16), Indie Rock (12), Rock (10), Hip-Hop (9), R&B (8). 59 of the 93 names contain more than one word, and the average puzzle in this decade puts 10 letters on the board.
The shortest name in this category is Pink, which gives you just 4 tiles to work with. Short is not easy. Fewer letters means fewer distinctive ones, and there are only so many ways to read a small pile of common characters.
The longest is My Chemical Romance at 17 letters. Long boards look far worse than they are, because a name that size nearly always hides a short connecting word you can pull out and set aside.
14 of these acts carry a Q, X, Z or J somewhere in the name, which is 15 percent of the category. If one of those turns up on your board, you have narrowed the field enormously before you have decoded anything else. Start there.
Names get longer and more inventive from this decade onward. Multi-word names are common, so the letter count is less reliable as a guide than it is in the early decades. Look for repeated letters instead.
Play this decade. The 2000s category runs its own daily puzzle, its own puzzle number and its own streak, separate from every other category. Start playing the 2000s.
Spoiler notice: this is the complete list of every act that can appear in the 2000s puzzle. If you would rather work them out for yourself, stop here.
Think something is missing? Suggestions are welcome via the contact page. The only firm rule is that acts with digits in their names cannot be included, because the numbers do not survive the alphabetising step and the puzzle becomes unsolvable.