The 2020 Minute “Best of The Decade” Playlist You Needed

Photo by Spencer Imbrock

Guest post by Sayre Piotrowski and Nico Simonian

We gathered together our most knowledgeable, and opinionated, friends from in and around the music industry and asked them to come up with a playlist that represented the past decade. Here it is…

Nearly 600 songs. Nearly 34 hours of music.

There have been plenty of not great things about the past ten years, but it would be tough to argue that we are not currently living in the greatest time ever to be a consumer of popular music. If you are around the age of the average consumer of this website you’ve lived through the hey-day of the compact disc, file-sharing, and now streaming.

Where the Napster era allowed us all to sink ever deeper into the siloed scenes we were already a part of, the algorithmic era, tends to lead us on more broad musical explorations. Today each of us has in our pocket a device that allows access to the overwhelming majority of the recorded popular music. Music is more easily shared across genres, generations, and geographical barriers than ever before, and we think that is fucking dope.

The process of composing this list involved the submission of over 1000 tracks and some heated arguments over everyone from Carly Rae Jepsen to Conway The Machine. During those arguments, we determined that this list is racist because it includes “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk, but not “24K Magic” by Bruno Mars and that it is sexist because the only appearance of Taylor Swift comes in the form of a misogynistic taunt on Kanye West’s “Famous.” Still, we hope you enjoy listening to this list as much as we enjoyed putting it together!

Happy New Year, Happy New Decade, Happy New Music!

*Contributors to this list included musicians, DJs, writers and performers from across the country (but mostly from the Bay and NYC).