21 under 21

Tyler Brown spent more than a decade working at Syco Entertainment, which launched the careers of superstar groups like One Direction and Fifth Harmony while the members were still in their teens. The vector for their rapid success was the TV show The X Factor. “We would take kids off the street, put them on TV in front of 15 million people twice a week, and then by the end of that show, they were famous,” says Brown, who recently co-founded the indie label Heatwave Records. “Then you put a record out in a few months, and it goes to No. 1. And that’s all in the space of less than a year.” 

More than a decade later, though, teen superstars are vanishingly rare. This is immediately apparent when looking at Billboard‘s annual 21 Under 21 list, which snapshots the next generation of rising artists. 10 years ago, it was stocked full of acts who were already household names: Not only Fifth Harmony, but Five Seconds of Summer, Lorde, Shawn Mendes, and Troye Sivan. In 2021, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish were both on the list. 

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This year, however, there aren’t any massive pop stars under the age of 21. 

“There’s not a centralization of key platforms where people are finding artists,” says Mike Weiss, vp of music and head of A&R at UnitedMasters. “Everything is more niche. To become a superstar, it takes time to build from community to community and expand that base.” 

That process typically is “a lot longer now,” Brown says, relative to the peak years of The X Factor. Many of the artists who recently enjoyed major breakthroughs triumphed in their mid-twenties after long grinds. Sabrina Carpenter released five albums before rocketing to fame on her sixth, while Noah Kahan put out two full-lengths and two EPs before releasing the album that propelled him into the mainstream. The career trajectory of country star Jelly Roll makes those ascents seem swift by comparison — he started to pepper the charts with hits only after releasing his eighth album. 

“The time horizon of breaking an artist ten years ago used to be 18 to 36 months once they had signed to a major label,” Ben Maddahi, svp of A&R for Columbia Records, told NME in 2023. “Now it’s more like three to five years. It’s not going to happen quickly.”

In previous decades, stars were minted by the TV shows and radio stations that served as the central engine of music discovery. Major labels had the marketing resources and relationships to carpet-bomb these formats, sending listeners scrambling to cough up cash for records or CDs or downloads. At the dawn of the social media age, they started harvesting talent from YouTube (like Justin Bieber and Troye Sivan) and Vine (like Shawn Mendes) and plugging them into the major-label machine that created pop juggernauts.

But today’s fans are spread across an increasingly wide range of streaming services and social media platforms, each with its own priorities and approach to music. Young listeners, who are most likely to mint the next young stars, primarily learn about new songs through Spotify and TikTok, according to a 2024 report from Edison Research. For listeners aged 35 to 54, however, YouTube and radio airplay are far more important. TikTok doesn’t even register as a music discovery avenue for listeners 55 and up, where radio remains dominant. 

Edison Research’s report surveyed music lovers on 14 different potential sources of discovery, and they could conceivably have inquired about more — they didn’t ask if anyone still learned about music by reading journalism, for example. In this fractured environment, “there’s no button to push” to blitz everyone simultaneously, says Jonathan Daniel, co-founder of Crush Music, which manages Miley Cyrus and Lorde, among others. “It’s so much less of a monoculture,” Daniel adds, “that it takes longer” to build a star. 

At the same time, the rise of short-form video platforms — especially TikTok — has allowed songs to become popular faster than ever. But record companies have repeatedly been forced to reckon with the wide gulf that separates a viral hit from an enduring career. “Before, we were very focused on, ‘How do we make this a global artist that can be all these different things?’” explains Olly Shepard, senior vp of publishing at Artist Partner Group. “Now the song breaks, and then we have to build the artist around that.” 

This can be challenging — some teenagers weren’t even contemplating a music career before they went viral and signed a record deal. It’s no surprise, then, that “labels have struggled to create follow-ups for a lot of the young artists” they signed following big TikTok hits, Brown says. “They need to have two, three, four records in a row to become a fully established artist.”

The last five years have shown that, even in a world where singles can become global phenomena nearly overnight, the star-building process remains stubbornly hard to accelerate. Many of the artists who are signed because of their prowess on short-form video platforms are “talented but under-prepared, and once signed, it becomes apparent that most need a couple of years just to get up to speed,” Maddahi said. “If you’re signing a 15-year-old kid off TikTok, they’ve likely never toured before, performed before or even been in a real studio.” 

On top of that, some executives argue that the music industry is no longer prioritizing breaking new stars the way it once was — Chappell Roan famously got dropped after her first stint at a major label only to explode four years later. In a landscape full of viral singles and myriad sub-pockets of fandom, many labels are taking the approach of “let’s sign more small things, but in the aggregate they’re equivalent to a star,” says Leon Morabia, a partner at Mark Music & Media Law. “That’s not the same thing as picking someone because they’re so talented or so charismatic.”

Young artists can still carve out a robust career even if they’re only owning their particular niche. “There’s room for artists to have enormous success within their individual lanes — it just isn’t the type of success where casual music fans know who you are,” says Jeff Vaughn, founder and CEO of Signal Records. “That level of exposure and awareness is taking much longer to achieve now.”

A version of this story appears in the May 17, 2025, issue of Billboard.