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BRUNO MARS

Their Year in Pop: While our favorite Hooligan was mounting massive shows around the world in early 2024, there was little news regarding his post-Silk Sonic musical moves. Then, in August, Mars announced “Die with a Smile,” a country-inflected pop-rock ballad with Lady Gaga, which quickly became an undeniable smash, reaching No. 2 on the Hot 100 and spending eight weeks atop the Billboard Global 200. Nominated for two Grammys (including song of the year), “Die with a Smile” was a winning duet — and in October, Mars would follow it up with another one in “APT.,” a delightfully bratty, Ting Tings-evoking link-up with BLACKPINK solo star ROSÉ, which also reached the Hot 100’s top 10 (No. 8) and spent seven weeks atop the Global 200. The combined success of the two hits helped Mars recapture the solo pop powers he put on the backburner during his Silk Sonic era, expertly setting the tone for whatever he has planned in 2025. 

Why Not Top 10? Few stars have two songs as massive as “Die with a Smile” and “APT.” this year… but when those are your only two musical releases for an entire calendar year, it’s hard to say you’re one of the year’s 10 greatest pop stars.

DRAKE

Their Year in Pop: Drake’s 2024 represented an indisputable downturn for the longtime superstar, but he still reminded the world that his pop stardom is unshakeable. Spillover success from 2023’s For All the Dogs kept Drake a consistent chart presence at the top of the year, as he continued his It’s All A Blur / Big as the What? trek, now one of the highest-grossing hip-hop tours in live events history. Then came Kendrick Lamar’s “Like That” verse; while the Compton MC scored the feud’s biggest commercial wins, the 6ix God still got some licks in, with “Family Matters” (No. 7) reaching the Hot 100’s top 10, and he generally pushed Lamar to new heights throughout. From sidestepping his label, Universal Music Group (UMG), with his unconventional 100 Gigs archive dump to eventually filing two potentially seismic legal actions against them, Drake’s most notable 2024 moves could bring massive change to the music industry as we know it. Meanwhile, all five of the 100 Gigs tracks that eventually made it to streaming landed on the Hot 100, and Drizzy ended the year as Spotify’s most-streamed English-language rapper in the U.S. and globally. 

Why Not Top 10: His resilience is admirable, but that Kung Fu Kenny K.O. was undeniable.

See all 10 of our Honorable Mention picks for 2024 here.

Hozier — yes, the guy that sent a soulful rock ballad about a romantic relationship thriving in the face of religious discrimination to No. 2 on the Hot 100 back in 2014 — could have made 2024 a well-deserved victory lap after dropping a chart-topping album and embarking on a packed arena tour in 2023. Instead, he spent 2024 securing a commercial re-peak that he earned by spending the past decade growing his cult fanbase, even without further post-“Church” crossover success. 

As his 2023 tour captivated multiple continents, footage from his shows helped Hozier pick up a devoted TikTok fan base who turned him into something of a heartthrob. They were enamored by his vulnerability, long flowing hair and signature “growl”; Hozier had entered his “Forest Daddy” era, and the world was thirsty for whatever that entailed. His newer TikTok audience was also drawn to his brand of folksy alt-rock that had a resurgence over the pandemic and the years immediately following, perhaps best exemplified by the breakout success of Noah Kahan. At the end of 2023, Hozier and Kahan joined forces for a duet version of the latter’s “Northern Attitude,” earning the Irish rocker his first top 40 appearance since “Church” and setting the stage for his 2024 commercial comeback. That level of fanbase-priming all helped result in the eye-popping streaming and sales debut of “Too Sweet,” the song that cemented Hozier’s mainstream commercial resurgence. 

Read our full Hozier Comeback of the Year essay here, written by Kyle Denis.

Can’t say he didn’t call it. Shaboozey’s 2024 album Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going essentially predicted in its title that after a near-decade of struggling to properly break through in the music industry, the hybrid country singer-songwriter was headed for different heights this year. And sure enough, by the end of the calendar, he had one of the biggest Billboard Hot 100 hits of all time, nominations and/or appearances at pretty much every award show you could think of, and the whole world knowing (and sometimes making uncomfortable jokes about) his name. “We in the club now,” he summarized his year to Billboard for his cover story in October – and like his album title, it was true on multiple levels. 

Read our full Shaboozey Rookie of the Year essay here, written by Andrew Unterberger.

When he wasn’t taking his now-famous daily cold plunge in an ice bath, Jelly Roll was everywhere in 2024.

Even if you can’t hum “I Am Not Okay,” which reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was the closest Jelly Roll got to a pure pop hit this year, you’re still likely aware of the gregarious rapper-turned-country artist through his sheer ubiquity. Jelly Roll, who turned 40 on Dec. 4, performed on no fewer than 10 collaborations from across the musical spectrum in 2024, alongside the wide-ranging likes of Eminem, Falling in Reverse, Jessie Murph, OneRepublic, Machine Gun Kelly, Halsey, Post Malone, Dustin Lynch and Brooks & Dunn. He also landed three No. 1 songs on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart for the second year in a row, and topped both the Hard Rock Songs and Mainstream Rock Airplay charts.  

Here’s what it was like to be Jelly Roll in 2024: During one weekend in early February, he paid tribute to Bon Jovi at the 33^rd annual MusiCares Person of the Year gala, followed by performing at the illustrious pre-Grammy gala hosted by Clive Davis the next night. And then to cap off the weekend, he also sang at the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for two trophies and met his longtime crush, Taylor Swift.

Read our full Jelly Roll No. 10 essay here, written by Melinda Newman.

By January 2024, Billie Eilish had already accomplished more in roughly five years than most pop stars do in a lifetime. The numbers spoke for themselves; since her breakthrough in 2019, the singer accrued seven Grammys, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a No. 1 single alongside four other top 10 hits on the Hot 100, two No. 1 debuts on the Billboard 200 and a sold-out arena tour. By practically every metric, Eilish had more than earned her place in the pantheon of modern pop greats. 

Where others might have rested on their laurels, Eilish spent her 2024 cementing her status as a leading artist of her generation while creating her own version of pop stardom. The scrappy, goth-core teenager who took over the world in 2019 was gone, replaced by a young woman finally starting to find her footing in a turbulent world.

Read the rest of our Billie Eilish No. 9 essay here, written by Stephen Daw.

When Post Malone rang in 2024 with an appropriately 24-song set at a Las Vegas New Year’s Eve concert, he pulled out his biggest hits – the ones that made him a superstar in the late 2010s by crisscrossing genre lines from hip-hop to rock to pop and beyond – including the Hot 100 No. 1s “Circles,” “Sunflower,” “Rockstar” and “Psycho.” But you had to look beyond the setlist for a forecast of what was to come this year. At Fontainebleau’s BleauLive Theater in the early hours of January 1st, 2024, the clearest sign of Post’s creative direction was twofold: his outfit choice of jorts, paired with a tank top, and the red Solo cup that rarely left his hand that night. Yes, Post was about to go country.

The Texas native had flirted with the genre in the past — making his Country Airplay debut on a posthumous duet version of Joe Diffie’s “Pickup Man,” last year and performing the song alongside Morgan Wallen and HARDY at the 2023 CMA Awards. At those awards, Access Hollywood asked backstage if he had his own country project in the works and Post answered, “I think so…yes.”

Read our full Post Malone No. 8 essay here, written by Katie Atkinson.

“OK, they ready: Drop the new music.” 

It was a quintessentially Beyoncé moment, the kind that has come to define the last decade-plus of her continually bar-raising 21st century pop superstardom. Greeting TV viewers around the world during the most-watched event of the year – February’s Super Bowl – Beyoncé co-starred with Veep actor Tony Hale in a Verizon ad in which she kept attempting to literally break the internet, to no avail. At the very end of the spot, having still failed to break the internet – even as “the first woman to launch the first rocket for the first performance in space” – she instead broke character, issuing the above decree over her spaceship’s intercom. 

Lo and behold, two new songs magically appeared online immediately after: “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” presumed to be the first tastes of her upcoming album, the second part of the history-excavating trilogy project she kicked off in 2022 with the dance-oriented Renaissance. As fans raced to DSPs to confirm the rumors of new music that they were seeing on their social media feeds – likely ignoring whatever was transpiring between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers following their game’s resumption – it appeared that the artist who first stopped the world with that digital drop way back in late 2013 had done it again. You could practically hear the chuckling worldwide: Only Beyoncé. 

Read our full Beyoncé No. 7 essay here, written by Andrew Unterberger.