2000s in music
overview of music-related events during the 2000s
For music from a year in the 2000s, go to 00 | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09
This article is an overview of the major events and trends in popular music in the 2000s.
In American culture, various styles of the late 20th century remained popular, such as rock, pop, metal, hip hop, R&B, EDM, country, and indie. As the technology of computers and internet sharing developed, a variety of those genres started to fuse, and new styles arose from them. Terms like "contemporary", "nu", "revival", "alternative", and "post" are added to various genre titles in order to differentiate them from past styles, with nu-disco and post-punk revival as notable examples.
The popularity of teen pop carried over from the 1990s with acts such as *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera dominating the charts in the earlier years of the decade. Previously established pop music artists such as Michael Jackson and Madonna made a comeback in the early 2000s with successful releases such as Invincible and Music.
Contemporary R&B was one of the most popular genres of the decade (especially in the early and mid-2000s), with artists like Usher, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé, and Rihanna. In 2004, the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 had 15 of its top 25 singles as contemporary R&B.
The decade was dominated by the garage rock revival and the birth of a new indie rock style. In this decade, grime and dubstep were genres invented in the UK, while chillwave became popular in the United States in the latter part of the decade.
In Britain, post-Britpop, post-punk revival, and alternative rock were at the height of their popularity, with acts such as Coldplay, The Libertines, Travis, The Hives, and Radiohead topping the major charts worldwide.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4598133. The Library of Congress control number is sh2001005065. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “2000s in music” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.