@Paul Dowding

The songs you love. The more you use Apple Music, the better the mix. Refreshed every Tuesday.

Whether it’s Monday morning or Friday night, get going with this personalised mix of upbeat music.

Songs to help you relax and unwind. Updated every Sunday.

Discover new music from artists we think you'll like. Refreshed every Friday.

The tracks you can’t get enough of lately, all in one place.

Dance music exploded in the 2000s, building on the combined energies of ’90s rave, Eurodance, chart rap and club pop. The result was a shape-shifting collection of sounds and styles that mapped a thrillingly unpredictable path from the underground to the mainstream and back again. Daft Punk led the pack, twisting vintage house and disco into the kind of giddily anthemic hits that could unite veteran clubbers with casual pop fans. David Guetta, Calvin Harris and the Swedish House Mafia found crossover success by forging the upbeat sounds of electro-house, trance and progressive into festival-ready, radio-friendly fusions, thus setting the stage for the EDM boom of the 2010s. And while Britney Spears and Rihanna were slipping Top 10 hits past the nightclub’s velvet rope, old-school heads like LCD Soundsystem, Justice and Chromeo were drawing on synth-pop and disco, turning retro inspirations into a new strain of dance-floor populism.

It seemed anything could happen in the noughties. This playlist—which reveals the 200 most enduringly popular songs from the 2000s on Apple Music—captures the boundless optimism of the decade, with music that was made, it so often seemed, for good times only. The era’s unstoppable guitar music leads the way, with The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” the single most-streamed track of the decade, closely followed by the sticky-dance-floor anthems of Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks and Florence + the Machine. And it’s no surprise that Coldplay feature so heavily here: 2000 brought the arrival of debut album <I>Parachutes</I>, introducing the world to a British band that would go stratospheric. The 2000s’ hip-hop and R&B remains just as enduring, from Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”—the 2002 track that won him an Oscar—to Estelle’s Kanye-featuring, still-played-at-every-house-party “American Boy” and, of course, Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”, which remains one of the best pop songs of all time. But it wasn’t just the superstars that made this such an important decade for music culture. After the launch of iTunes and the iPod in 2001, the way music was consumed shifted forever, our “on-shuffle” habits corroding the lines between genre. And this playlist proves how fresh the songs born of that mindset remain, barrier-breaking hits like M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” and the thrilling JAY-Z/LINKIN PARK mash-up “Numb / Encore” still among the decade’s most listened-to tracks. Stars would begin to emerge from fresh corners of culture, too. There was, of course, the early-2000s explosion of TV talent contests providing a steady stream of chart-toppers, but artists including the Arctics, Lily Allen, Adele, Lady Gaga and Kate Nash cleverly weaponised fledgling social media platforms to build fervent fanbases. This new breed of artist would rise up to have lasting impacts on modern pop. Take a trip down memory lane here.