Read This: Were the mid-2000s the "deleted years" of music?

For many of us who grew up reading the internet’s first cultural retrospective essays, some might feel strange seeing that era itself finally age into its own evaluations. Particularly when, recalling that 2002-2010-ish musical timespan, we can’t for the life us remember or necessarily even access large portions of it. As a generation of kids adjusted to digitally consuming culture instead of physically purchasing it, not much thought was understandably given by said kids about preserving those new files and libraries, specifically music.
Yesterday over at Esquire, longtime culture critic (and former MTV heyday personality) Dave Holmes penned a great examination of what he dubs The Deleted Years—the mid-aughts’ post-iPod, pre-Spotify timespan in which music collections were dubiously stored in various Windows and Mac folders at best, and actively overwritten or accidentally deleted from MP3 players at worst. The dive into the era of JoJo, Tapes n’ Tapes, and Duffy (all very real and at one time very ubiquitous) presents a good argument as to why this chapter of popular music feels so ghostly and nebulous, drawing from a variety of factors like digitization, as well as the decline of both televised music videos and Top 40 charts.