The 2010s is the decade streaming won. It is also, by some distance, the decade with the smallest rock presence in this entire game, and those two facts are closely related.
When listening moves from ownership to access, the economics change completely. You are no longer paid for persuading someone to buy a record once. You are paid, fractionally, every time somebody plays it. That rewards music that gets played repeatedly and passively, that works on a playlist next to other things, and that grabs attention in the opening seconds before a listener skips.
Pop is comfortably the largest genre here as a result, and it reconsolidated in a way it had not managed since the eighties. Hip-Hop sits second, and over the course of the decade it became the single most consumed genre in the world, overtaking rock properly and permanently on the streaming platforms where consumption was now measured.
Dance has a substantial presence in this category, reflecting a period when electronic producers moved from clubs to stadiums and the producer became the headline act rather than the person behind the desk. The festival circuit that grew up around it was enormous, briefly, and reshaped how a large chunk of a generation experienced live music.
Country also holds a strong position here, which surprises people who were not paying attention. It remained one of the most commercially reliable genres of the decade, with an audience that kept buying records and tickets long after other genres had gone fully streaming.
The arrival of K-Pop in this category is the beginning of something the following decade makes obvious. A genre built on a completely separate industrial system, in a language most of its international audience does not speak, achieved mainstream global success without going through the traditional American gatekeepers at all. Social media did the distribution that radio used to do, and it did not care about borders.
The other structural change was that the individual song came loose from the album entirely. Playlists became the unit of consumption, features and collaborations proliferated because they gave access to two audiences at once, and the idea of an artist having one coherent sound became optional.
The 2010s category in Alphabetish contains 91 acts. The genres best represented are Pop (23), Hip-Hop (15), Dance (10), Country (10), Indie Pop (5). 69 of the 91 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 Zedd, 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 Florence and the Machine at 21 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.
15 of these acts carry a Q, X, Z or J somewhere in the name, which is 16 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.
Solo artists using their own names are common in this decade, which means ordinary forenames and surnames on the board. If the letters look like a person rather than a concept, they probably are.
Play this decade. The 2010s category runs its own daily puzzle, its own puzzle number and its own streak, separate from every other category. Start playing the 2010s.
Spoiler notice: this is the complete list of every act that can appear in the 2010s 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.