The Best of the decade: A wrap up of the decade’s cultural highs and lows: The Top 10 pop culture trends | The Top 10 albums | The Top 10 Movies | The Top 10 TV shows

1. The death of the CD: Nearly 20 years ago, record stores dumped the records and replaced them with the bright, shiny compact disc. Unfortunately for those stores, the CD itself has been replaced with something that won’t fit on a dusty shelf. Digital music, from the much-maligned and rehabbed Napster, to the all-powerful iTunes, have put more songs at a listener’s fingertips than could ever be housed in one physical store. Fans can virtually make their own albums, which means that brick and mortar stores are no longer necessary (RIP, Tower Records.)

2. Reality shows as life and career rehab: Once upon a time, celebrities would have volunteered to reverse their own plastic surgery with a rusty knitting needle before they’d admit that maybe their careers, love lives and facial elasticity weren’t what they used to be. But now, if it’ll get them back in the limelight, stars of recent yesteryear are willing to admit that they’re fat (Celebrity Fit Club), players (Scott Baio Is 45 and Single, Rock of Love With Brett Michaels), broke (Broke and Famous starring Willie Aames) or drunk (Celebrity Rehab). I guess it’s better than being forgotten about. I guess.

3. The raunchy comedy with vomit jokes grows up: In the 1990s, movie makers were copying the American Pie-esque trend of obnoxious teen sex romps. But just because that target audience got older didn’t mean that their tastes did. Thus, the rise of Judd Apatow and his minions, who combined the gross-out, bodily humor with moments of real emotion mixed in (The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Knocked Up.)

4. The death of the traditional TV season: Waiting for the summer for your favorite show to be rerun? You better fire up the Hulu, or buy the DVD. Even though fall is still the traditional start of the season, there are new shows popping up willy-nilly all over broadcast and cable, at any time, and not just the “replacement” shows that weren’t good enough to start in December. And sometimes, a show can have two seasons in the same year (NBC’s The Biggest Loser started in October 2004, but starts its 10th season in January 2010). This means that not only are there more choices, but that new shows seem to get less of a grace period, because there’s always another show waiting in the wings.

5. ‘American Idol’ justifies its existence: Once thought to be a hacky TV talent show, the British-born spectacle of dreams realized and crushed mercilessly has not only become a hit in its own right, but done what it said it would: Produce pop culture phenomenons. There’s pop stalwart Kelly Clarkson, country heavyweight Carrie Underwood, rock god Chris Daughtry, fan fave Clay Aiken and current headline grabber Adam Lambert. And let’s not forget the show’s biggest crossover success, Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, who Simon Cowell famously predicted would have a limited career. See, the show’s so big, even the show can’t predict how far their alumni can go!

6. Hollywood stops bothering writing original scripts: OK, so that’s not really true. But some of the biggest phenomenons of the decade were either based on books (Twilight, the Narnia books, the Harry Potter series, Brokeback Mountain), comic books (X-Men, Spider Man), TV shows (Sex and the City), TV movies (High School Musical 3), Broadway plays (Chicago), Broadway plays based on movies (Hairspray) and movies based on comic books (the Dark Knight series). Obviously, adaptations aren’t anything new. But the sheer number of these things makes us wonder whether Hollywood’s afraid to bank big bucks on an unknown quantity. If it ain’t broke … make it into a movie.

7. AutoTune rears its eerily perfect, robotic head: OK, so Jay-Z says it’s dead. And we kind of hope it is. But for a little bit, the voice-bending technology, whose popularity most people like to blame on Cher’s Believe in the late ’90s, saw a brief resurgence, which we’re going to blame on T-Pain. Sure, Auto-Tune can also perfect a vocal performance (we hear Britney Spears has it to thank), but it also makes music monochromatic and, frankly, boring.

8. No more love in the afternoon: This has been an extraordinarily bad decade for soap operas. While the death knell for the long-standing daytime drama began with the 1999 cancellation of NBC’s Another World, the genre keeps taking hits in ratings, relevance and numbers. Relative newbie Passions, with its witches and talking dolls, took a powder in 2007, followed by the death of CBS’ Guiding Light, the oldest serial drama, in 2009. And this month, CBS announced that As the World Turns will end a 54-year run in 2010. Blame shifting viewing habits, myriad choices on cable, DVRs all you want, but in trying to appeal to new viewers with shaky cameras, mob violence and flashiness, soaps forgot all about the love. Hope y’all like judge shows and game shows!

9. Big-screen women find a home on the small one: Rather than submit to a movie fate of playing the mother of actors five years younger than they are, film actresses 40 and over have found that some the juiciest, sexiest, most complex roles of their careers are to be found on TV. From Kyra Sedgwick’s quirky interrogator The Closer to Holly Hunter’s self-destructive, angel-blessed cop on Saving Grace and Glenn Close’s vicious litigator on Damages, these shows have helped shows for grown-ups look lucrative again.

10. Torture porn: For anyone who ever watched Jason Voorhees hack up campers and thought “Gee, I wish he’d picked her eye out with a Sharpie and fed it to her,” this decade’s been a vicious, graphic buffet of medieval torture devices (Saw), slow-motion killing (Rob Zombie’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) and all manner of dumb kids meeting horrific ends that just … don’t … end (Hostel, Turistas). They’re sick, disturbing and, as long as they make money, not going anywhere.