Shorter titles, bigger names, and the rise of the two tile puzzle.
The 2000s is the decade when the album quietly stopped being the unit. Downloads arrived, the single was unbundled from the record that contained it, and by the end of the decade the question "what album is that on" had begun to sound slightly antique. Cryptune registers this shift as a tilt towards songs and a fall in the average length of a title.
Titles got shorter and more declarative. Two words, often a verb and a noun, occasionally a single word doing all the work. Part of this is the search box: a title that people have to type is a title that benefits from being short and unambiguous, and the decade adapted to that faster than anyone admitted at the time.
It is also the decade where hip hop stops being a genre in the game and starts being a substantial share of it. The naming conventions are distinct, frequently first-person and frequently confrontational, and they clue very differently from a rock album title. A title that makes a claim about its author gives a clue writer something to work with that an abstract noun does not.
Guitar bands did not vanish, and the ones represented here are largely the ones who titled things well. A memorable two-word phrase has outlasted a great deal of more accomplished music from the same years, which is unfair but is how titles work.
The most represented acts in this section are a fair snapshot of who was actually enormous, spread across British indie, American indie and hip hop without any one of them dominating the way the sixties has its obvious centre.
The 2000s accounts for 83 puzzles in Cryptune, split 45 songs to 38 albums. The average puzzle from this decade has 2.2 tiles, and 25 of them are single tile puzzles, meaning the whole answer is one word.
The longest answer from the decade is Confessions on a Dance Floor, at 5 words. The most common clue types across those puzzles are synonym with 121, direct with 29 and opposites with 21.
The acts appearing most often from this decade are Coldplay (5), Eminem (5), Kanye West (5), The Killers (5) and Radiohead (4).
Two tiles is the default. More than a third of this decade is two-tile puzzles, so the shape of the problem is usually the same: two words, both real, neither of them small connecting words. That means both tiles are doing genuine work and neither is a freebie.
With only two words to play with, guessing early is unusually good value. A wrong guess costs 5 points and a revealed tile costs 15, and in a two-word answer a single revealed tile hands you half the puzzle, which is a lot of information to buy. Try the guess first.
Artist knowledge helps less here than in the seventies. The titles are short and generic enough that plenty of them could belong to almost anyone, so work the words rather than trying to place the act.
All 83 answers from this decade, listed alphabetically with the act responsible. Puzzle dates are not shown, so this tells you what is in the game without telling you what is coming tomorrow.
Want to know how the clues themselves are built? The clue school takes each clue type in turn. Or go back to all decades.