@Christopher Heath

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. Updated as you listen.

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

Whether it’s a weekday morning or Saturday night, get going with this personalised mix of upbeat music. Refreshed every Monday.

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

As the calendar flipped to Y2K, teen pop ruled music’s roost, with megastars like Britney Spears and *NSYNC dominating the charts. But over the course of the 2000s, a varied pop landscape would emerge, with streetwise hip-hop, emotionally fraught rock, swooning R&B, hook-studded emo and big-tent pop all getting their moments in the sun—and even coming together in DJ-crafted mash-ups and high-profile collaborations. Pop in the 21st century’s first decade reflected the emergent digital-music era, with the “on shuffle” ideal resulting in radio playlists where Kanye rubbed elbows with The Killers and Kelly Clarkson, or where a hard-hitting Eminem track was bracketed by offerings from Beyoncé and Mariah Carey. That mix of genres and outsize personalities made for an exciting decade that put the party back in pop.

By the 1990s, it started to feel like the Song of the Summer had turned into a real thing—this stuff wasn’t an accident anymore; it was a competition. Not that the music suffered for it. If anything, even the rise of alternative rock—bands who seemed almost constitutionally opposed to joining in on such ordinary fun—produced great summer songs, while hip-hop’s move towards the mainstream and the boy-band/teen-pop wave gave us more big-tent pleasures than we knew what to do with. With that, here’s a playlist that captures not only the spirit of ’90s pop, but the summers it soundtracked—and still does. Our editors like to mix things up here now and then, so if you hear something you like, add it to your library.