If there’s anything that defines music in the 21st century, it’s constant change. We live in an era when your next favorite song could come from anywhere — all over the stylistic map, all over the world. The whole experience of being a music fan keeps mutating all of the time. Back in Y2K, when ‘NSync dropped “Bye Bye Bye,” it was the peak for the era of buying CDs, until that era went bye-bye-bye. Napster happened; so did MySpace and the iPod. Streaming arrived; vinyl came back. New sounds keep getting invented, with the air full of eclectic and experimental songs. If you’re a music fan these days, you’ve got a whole planet of sound at your fingertips.

That’s the spirit behind our list of the 21st century’s 250 greatest songs so far. Like our list of the century’s greatest albums, it’

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