Our Decade In iTunes, Ol' Dirty Bastard Through the Fleshtones and Good Ol' Morrissey

Brittanie Shey December 25, 2009 11:00AM

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Maybe the biggest evolution in music this decade has been the availability of online downloads, starting with Napster and ending with half a dozen legitimately - licensed venues for purchasing music over the tubes.

Rocks Off will admit it. Back in the day, we were illegal downloaders. Waiting 20 minutes for a three-minute song to cross over our shitty college Internet connection (they didn't even have Wi-Fi on campus then) was a labor of love, and thank the FSM for our friends Matt and Greg who introduced us to the magical musical spreadsheet that is iTunes - a program that made working long late hours at the university newspaper less boring. After that, our listening habits were never the same.

Case in point - iTunes has a field by which you can sort songs according to date added. We think this might give some insight into how our tastes have changed since those college years. Below, a decade of iTunes music.

2000

This may have been the first songs Rocks Off ever downloaded. We're not sure, but it's certainly the first one we remember, listening to it late at night and laughing out loud at Old Dirty's hilarious twisted logic.

2001

Irony was not yet a "thing," and Rocks Off, freshly 21, was going through a hellish 80s phase that also included lots of Cyndi Lauper and The Cars.

2002

Modern music got good for a second there. The Strokes and The White Stripes opened our eyes to a new style of music that owed much to the past and was a sign of things to come. Also? Catchy as hell.

2003

Okay, so why listen to The Strokes when you could listen to their forebearers. The Animals and The Zombies (love!) were favorites for the mixed CDs we burned this year.

2004

Rocks Off finally ponied up and bought an iPod this year, so we could work at our suburban newspaper cubicle in peace without having to bothered by things like ringing phones or pushy editors. The first album we bought and transferred to our new mp3 player? The Life Aquatic soundtrack, featuring both Devo and David Bowie.