The Top Pop Artists of the Decade - 2000s

Popular music is tough to define, besides the obvious qualifications: Does the song have mass appeal? Are people talking about it? Is the track glossy and polished? Does your mom tap her feet to it? Answer "yes" to at least three of these and you've got yourself a pop song. As the 00's winds down, we're in a nostalgic mood and looking back at the decade's best pop artists, from Britney to Beyonce. When it came to the Top 40 set, this here was a great time to love music. Though we know you'll have serious problems with it, here now are our picks for the Best Pop Artists of the '00s

10. Black Eyed Peas
9. Amy Winehouse
8. Pink
7. Jay-Z
6. Coldplay
5. Gwen Stefani
4. Green Day
3. Justin Timberlake

Whatever Justin did, we're sure the other *NSYNC-ers wish they thought of. We don't know how he made the transition from the clean-cut boy band image to Michael Jackson-esque R&B-Pop without us batting an eye ... but he did. We'll give credit to Timbaland for much of it. Songs like 'Cry Me A River' and 'SexyBack' were new and unusual songs that we couldn't get out of our heads. And that Superbowl performance with Janet Jackson? That erased any trace of a good-boy image he had left.
2. Beyonce
1. Britney Spears
You can't deny it, Britney has dominated the decade. Her music endures on MTV and radio and her often erratic and always interesting personal life has made for endless tabloid fodder. Her musical output between 2000-2008 was astounding. She dropped a huge 'Oops!' at the dawn of the decade and followed that with 'Britney' a year later. In 2003, she delivered what we think is one of the best pop songs of the decade, 'Toxic' (complete with an insanely sexy music video). Two more albums followed, with the latest dropping last year. True, it's impossible to ignore her personal woes (marriages, divorces, drinking, weird boyfriends, shaved heads, rehab ...), but in the end this was all about a former Mouseketeer developing into the world's biggest star.

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