Ricky Martin & Christina Aguilera "Nobody Wants to Be Lonely"

It was 2001 and the only way to get a copy of Ricky Martin and Christina Aguilera's monster duet "Nobody Wants to Be Lonely" was to buy the song's album or record it off the radio.  Why?  The song was never released as a CD single -- meaning you couldn't go out and buy the song (or in today's terms: you couldn't just download the single from iTunes).  The song wound up being one of the biggest songs of the year and a real head-scratcher as the record companies who would soon lose their grip on CD sales with the rise of Napster and illegal downloads.

Newton Faulkner - "Dream Catch Me"

My old Dell laptop has been dying a slow death for the past handful of years now.  Last Christmas, I made the switch to a new Dell meaning I was no longer running on the Vista platform and now had the much-ballyhooed/maligned Windows 10.   While my day-to-day computer work moved to my new Dell, I left iTunes untouched on my old laptop because, frankly, I knew that it would be a complete clusterfuck.  The straightforward directions from Apple made the process appear simple and seamless.  The reality was quite different.  After doing exactly what Apple.com suggested, my music transferred over successfully.  The problem was that only about one-third of my massive music collection made the trek.  I don't know why the other songs decided they didn't want to join the party.  So, I tried again only to have my playlists not transfer.  A third attempt yielded my entire music library making the trek including multiple copies of the majority of my songs, but again no playlists.  So, I manually deleted well over 1,000 duplicates of songs.  Next up, go in and trim the audio and recreate all my playlists.  (Why the hell haven't I just make the switch to Spotify, you're asking.  Again, I don't have a reasonable answer.)  I did discover many songs I thought I deleted years ago.  One such song came from English singer-songwriter Newton Fulkner.  Newton made the lunchtime concert circuit back in 2007, and I was graced with a free lunch, music, and a shiny new CD called Hand Built By Robots.  "Dream Catch Me" achieved success over the pond, but never really found an audience in the States.  Now, back to the clusterfuck known as iTunes...

Smash Mouth - "Walkin' on the Sun"

Before downloading MP3s through iTunes, you would drive over to your local record store and purchase CDs.  In case you just wanted to buy one song instead of the full album, you'd buy a single.  Despite its name, singles contained more than one song.  Much like records, singles had a B-side.  In the case of Smash Mouth's "Walkin' on the Sun", the B-side was a song called "Sorry About Your Penis".

Keane - "Somewhere Only We Know"

Along with American Idol, Fox's Glee helped introduce established songs to a whole new generation.  I was excited when I heard that Glee would feature Keane's "Somewhere Only We Know" in an episode in 2010.  I felt Keane (both as an artist and the song itself) deserved bigger fame--especially in the States.  Little did I know that "Somewhere Only We Know" was already a huge global hit in 2004 (for whatever reason I first heard the song a year later when a friend told me I should rip the CD into my iTunes library).  It's pretty pathetic when you hope people discover a song that has not only been discovered, but embraced by an entire planet.  The bigger question is: what the hell was I doing in 2004 that I missed it?