Greatest Pop Stars by Year

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard has been counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 for the last week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 1, we remember the year in Kendrick Lamar — who had a year that felt historic from its opening blast, and only got greater as it went. (Listen to our new Greatest Pop Stars podcast discussing both of our top two artists and the thinking behind their rankings here.)

Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 was about many things, but first and foremost, it was all about him letting people know just what he’s capable of. It was essentially the thesis statement behind the biggest song of his year (“Sometimes you gotta pop out and show n—as”), with a sentiment that also ended up offering the title to the centerpiece event of his year. And throughout 2024, the often low-profile rapper did indeed keep popping out, emerging with new releases or revelations that captured headlines and captivated the culture. By year’s end, the people had unquestionably been shown, in ways they would never forget.  

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And in truth, it wasn’t unreasonable for the veteran MC to assume that a reminder was needed. Not that anyone had really forgotten about Kendrick Lamar or his greatness; his run of unanimously acclaimed albums and beloved singles in the 2010s had already cemented him as a consensus all-time great. But praise for his most recent album, 2022’s challenging Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, was tempered and mostly brief: It received positive initial reviews and strong first-week numbers, but failed to either spawn a long-running hit single or dominate critics’ year-end lists the way his previous sets had. The following year, his output was kept to two collaborative singles, with Baby Keem on “The Hillbillies” and Beyoncé on the “America Has a Problem” remix; both were met with similar initial enthusiasm but little lasting commercial impact. Lamar was still a huge force in hip-hop and an overall legend, but he hadn’t been a major needle-mover in the mainstream since 2017-18, when he dominated pop culture with DAMN. and his curated Black Panther soundtrack.

What made Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 so remarkable, though, was that he didn’t just remind us of all the reasons why he was so big at his commercial and cultural peak – he showed that he could do things we’d never even seen from him before. He showed that he was capable of hitting heights no other rapper had reached this decade, a period that had otherwise marked something of a downturn for the once seemingly indomitable genre’s mainstream prospects. He showed that he was able to create cultural moments of both singular blunt-force impact and massive historical gravity – and then to do it again, and then again. And he showed that at his absolute best and biggest, he could dominate the streets, the charts and everywhere in between with equal sun-blocking vastness, and emerge as the winner not only when pitted against his most direct adversaries, but against any other potential peer in popular music. 

And it was like that from the very jump. After a quiet first couple months to his year, Kendrick Lamar crash-landed onto 2024 in March with his guest verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s incendiary new “Like That.” Absolutely everything about the song and his appearance on it was a big deal: Lamar’s cameo was kept under wraps until its release as the lead single and sixth track on Future and Metro’s much-anticipated We Don’t Trust You album, and his unexpected presence was the most exciting part of a release that already was generating some of the loudest buzz of the early year. And the song itself was an obvious and immediate scorcher even before Kendrick’s entrance: Based around expertly deployed high-octane samples of ‘80s rap classics by Rodney O and Joe Cooley (“Everlasting Bass”) and Eazy-E (“Eazy-Duz-It”) and Future’s own effortless understated cool, “Like That” had a timeless and fundamentally hip-hop energy to it that any MC drop-in would have likely sounded great over.

But as explosive as the song could’ve been even without him, it was still Kendrick’s s–t-stirring guest verse that really lit its fuse. His “I choose violence” sentiments — which followed in the footsteps of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hiss,” a similarly firestarting (and internet-conquering) Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit from a couple months earlier — were inflammatory from his opening bars, but largely narrowed their focus as his verse went on to two specific targets: fellow rap superstars Drake and J. Cole. Those two had scored a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 together the year before with “First Person Shooter,” from Drake’s For All the Dogs album. The song – which Lamar was also rumored to have been invited to appear on – declared the trio a “Big Three,” via Cole’s guest verse, implying (as many rap fans had similarly claimed throughout the years) that they were rap’s reigning triumvirate, having each enjoyed over a decade of consistent commercial success and fan support. 

The three were not necessarily entering 2024 on equal footing, though – particularly not Kendrick and Drake. Kendrick’s critical acclaim and across-the-board approval was easily the most consistent of the three – he has 17 career Grammys, third-most among all rappers and over three times as many as Drake’s 5 – but he had also been the spottiest in recent years as a hitmaker. Meanwhile, Drake’s reviews had become progressively less enthused throughout his prior decade, but he remained bulletproof on the charts: “First Person Shooter” had been his 13th Hot 100 No. 1, moving him into a tie with Michael Jackson for the most in chart history among male solo artists. (Kendrick had just two total for his career to that point, and none since 2017.) 

While holding increasingly polarized places in the industry, the two pivotal hip-hop figures also maintained an uneasy relationship with one another. They started on good terms in 2011, with Kendrick getting a big early look on “Buried Alive Interlude” from Drake’s Take Care, and as an opener on his Club Paradise tour the next year, but their relationship chilled soon after – particularly in 2013, when Kendrick appeared on Big Sean’s “Control.” With that instantly legendary guest verse, the West Coast superstar essentially anointed himself the best rapper of his generation, while listing his competition (including Drake and Cole) by name and saying – with love – that he was aiming to “murder” all of them. Drake smarted at the callout, and the two would trade subliminal barbs back and forth on-and-off-record for years to follow. 

By the time of “Like That,” Kendrick was not feeling so subliminal. He didn’t mention either Drake or Cole by name – yet – but he left little doubt as to his intentions this time around, literally stating, “F–k” sneak dissin’,” name-checking “First-Person Shooter” and then proclaiming with disdain so acidic it could eat through your stereo speakers: “Motherf–k the Big Three/ N—a, it’s just Big Me.” And while it was Cole’s quote he was responding to, Kendrick’s true malice seemed directed at Drake, given the verse’s references to “Prince outliv[ing] Mike Jack” and For All the Dogs (“He gon’ see Pet Sematary”). As the rap world collectively lost their minds at the sizzling beef of the consensus best rapper of his generation firing shots at the obvious biggest, the song became an immediate smash, debuting atop the Hot 100, lasting three weeks at No. 1 and confirming Kendrick as officially back. 

Nonetheless, as the days passed following Kendrick Lamar’s callout and rap rubberneckers awaited (if not demanded) a response from Drake, the first rapper to actually reply to the dis was J. Cole. As part of his surprise-release mixtape – anxiously titled Might Delete Later – Cole offered some thoughts about Kendrick on the album’s closer “7-Minute Drill.” He mocked the reclusive rapper’s lack of productivity (“He averagin’ one hard verse like every thirty months or somethin’”) and the underwhelming reception to Mr. Morale (“Your last s–t was tragic”) but still went pretty soft at him by rap diss standards, and even admitted his misgivings about the beef in the final verse: “I’m hesitant, I love my brother.” Those reservations bloomed into full-on regret within days, as the track got a mixed-at-best reception from fans – and by that Sunday, Cole was referring to “Drill” as “the lamest s–t I ever did in my f–king life” to his fans at his own Dreamville Festival, and vowing soon after to delete the track from the tape (which he did). 

Following Cole’s bow-out from the feud, fans once again turned to Drake for an answer. The biggest rapper in the game for the prior decade-plus, it was hardly the first time Drake had been so publicly provoked, and as a student of rap history (and of rap battles in particular), he’d proven up for the challenge multiple times before. In early April, “Push Ups” leaked on the internet, and showed a Drake who seemed revitalized and hungry for more. Dinging Kendrick for his allegedly bad label deal, his history of questionable guest verses for pop stars and his height, among many other things, “Push Ups” inspired mostly positive response – and unlike “7-Minute Drill,” made it clear that Drake was ready to rumble. Five days after officially releasing “Push Ups,” Drake dropped another diss: “Taylor Made Freestyle,” featuring AI’d versions of the Toronto rapper rhyming as Snoop Dogg and 2Pac – showing extra disrespect to the Compton MC by mimicking his West Coast progenitors – and further taunting Kendrick for not having responded to Drake’s first diss yet. 

With the days passing and no Kendrick response yet in the offing, some onlookers began to wonder if he was unprepared for Drake’s multi-pronged response. But he answered such doubts on Apr. 30 with the release of “Euphoria,” a six-plus-minute excoriation of all things Drizzy, poking at his insecurities about his mixed race and overall place in the culture, his supposedly absentee parenting and even his alleged issuing of a cease-and-desist order over “Like That.” Kendrick also declared himself “the biggest hater,” evidenced it with a laundry list of Drake items that inspired such ire in him (“I hate the way you way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress…”) and then warned against Drake responding: “If you take it there, I’m takin’ it further/ Psst, that’s something you don’t wanna do.” The song electrified the internet, topping the daily and real-time rankings across streaming services, debuting at No. 11 on the Hot 100 despite its mid-week drop and reaching No. 3 after its first full week of release.

From there, the volleys in the feud came increasingly fast and furious. That Friday, three days after “Euphoria,” Kendrick returned with “6:16 in L.A.,” an Al Green-sampling diss titled after Drake’s famous timestamp series, which posited that even members of Drake’s own team were turning against him in the beef. That song didn’t get much time to marinate though, as Drake responded that night with his biggest punch in the series: “Family Matters,” a remarkable seven-minute, three-part epic that saw Drake adapting multiple different flows to take on not just Kendrick but several of the side opponents who had jumped into the beef at various points, including Rick Ross, The Weeknd and A$AP Rocky. It also came with a video, featuring Drake crushing a version of the car Kendrick featured on the cover of his good kid, m.A.A.d city album, flaunting jewelry that used to belong to tertiary feud figure Pharrell and even eating at Chinese restaurant New Ho King, which Kendrick referenced on “Euphoria.” Most notably, it ended with accusations about Kendrick being physically abusive to fiancée Whitney Alford: “They hired a crisis management team/ To clean up the fact that you beat on your queen.” 

“Family Matters” was a stunner, but the song got even less time in the spotlight than “6:16 in L.A.” Not even an hour later, Kendrick returned fire with “Meet the Grahams,” a series of lyrical letters penned to Drake (real name: Aubrey Graham) and members of his family – mother Sandra, father Dennis, son Adonis – that made for the most vicious and coldest-sounding entry in the beef. Over icy piano plinks, Kendrick launched a full-on character assassination of his opponent, not only raising the stakes with major accusations of his own – that Drake had been sleeping with underage girls – but mentioning a secret daughter of the 6 God’s, calling back to Drake’s feud with rap great Pusha T in 2018, which had essentially ended with Push’s revelation that Drake was “hiding a child” in Adonis. By this point, the feud had gotten exceedingly messy with horrific allegations – some of which would be downright criminal in nature if proven true, but none of which were ever accompanied with any real evidence. The actual veracity of the matters seemed to mean less to onlookers than the escalation of both the drama of the back-and-forth and the speed by which it was now being accelerated, anyway, leaving rap fans delirious with whiplash and making it tricky to rule on who, if either, was leading in the fight. 

But the next song would be a clear K.O. Not even 24 hours after “Meet the Grahams,” Kendrick released his third new song of the weekend with “Not Like Us.” The song doubled down on the accusations of “Grahams,” with barbs as brain-sticking as they were condemning (“Tryin’ to strike a chord, and it’s probably A Minor…”), and also spent an entire verse breaking down how Drake used his Atlanta collaborators for cred and cachet, concluding “You ain’t a colleague, you a f–kin’ colonizer.” But more important than the song’s lyrical content was how goddamn catchy the thing was: Outside of the beef-starting “Like That,” Drake and Kendrick had mostly been sparring with long, hook-less songs based around aggressive, unwelcoming productions. “Not Like Us,” by contrast, was irresistible from its opening saxes and strings. With an infectious, Monk Higgins-sampling beat helmed by storied West Coast producer Mustard, and an universally applicable four-word chant-along chorus (“They not like us”), the song wasn’t just another crushing body blow in the beef – it was also an undeniable pop smash, the kind of jam you could hear and love without knowing a single thing about the context behind it.

And a whole lot of people did. Almost immediately, “Not Like Us” became the most popular and beloved song generated by the feud, debuting atop the Hot 100 – despite an incomplete first week of tracking, and despite arriving at the most competitive time for big hits on the chart in recent memory. The song was just that sensational, not only dazzling those who’d been invested in the back-and-forth from the start, but also delighting casual music fans of all stripes. Before long, it had spread all across pop culture, becoming a reference point for Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign and also the year’s biggest new jock jam, lighting up sports stadiums and arenas across the globe and eventually soundtracking the Los Angeles Dodgers’ World Series championship celebration. The song’s four-note riff became arguably the most iconic string hook since Bernard Herrmann’s classic Psycho score climax 64 years earlier – and probably even scarier for Drake, who was now trailing in the feud by just about any estimation.

Drake did respond to the Kendrick two-fer by the end of that weekend with “The Heart Pt. 6” – titled after Lamar’s own state-of-the-union series – which denied any relations with minors and taunted his foe for the hidden-daughter claims he made on “Grahams,” which Drake said was misinformation he’d purposefully leaked to Kendrick’s camp. But the song was not particularly well-received, with many viewing Drake as sounding overly defensive on the track, and also just coming off (understandably) exhausted in general. While Drake had competed well and showed out very respectably across the feud, his strategy had proven faulty: “The Heart” was another imposing, hook-less freestyle-type rant, which few were tempted to play back a second time when they could keep bumping “Not Like Us.” It all pointed to the most unlikely twist of the feud’s denouement: All throughout his beef history, Drake had carried the day by pivoting back to scoring hits, the one battlefield on which no competitor of his the prior 15 years could possibly match him. That it was Kendrick who won the feud by delivering the undeniable pop smash – with Drake still mired in dirgey beats and chorus-free invectives – was simply astonishing.

With the feud essentially over, the rapper having showed all he could possibly hope to show, and “Not Like Us” remaining omnipresent as the spring began to turn into summer, it was easy to imagine Kendrick Lamar – never one to overstay his welcome – retreating back to the shadows, and letting his now-unavoidable hit trumpet his W for him throughout the year’s remainder. But the first and most important indication that less-is-more was not going to be his strategy for 2024 came with the June announcement of his The Pop Out: Ken & Friends concert, to be held on Juneteenth at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif. While a Kendrick live show was not necessarily a particular rarity in itself – his Big Steppers tour had just taken him all over the world, through the end of 2023 – the date, location and general post-feud timing of this particular show suggested this was going to be more of an event than usual. 

Sabrina Carpenter

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That perception was quickly validated by the show – which was not only delivered to a packed Forum full of celebrities ranging from NBA stars LeBron James and James Harden to fellow pop megastars The Weeknd and SZA, but to millions watching around the globe via streaming on Amazon Prime. The “Friends” alluded to in the event’s name ended up being a Who’s Who of local talent, from up-and-comers to longtime West Coast stalwarts like Westside Boogie and Dom Kennedy to true national stars like Tyler, the Creator and Steve Lacy – as well as beloved hitmaking collaborators of host DJ Mustard, like Ty Dolla $ign and YG. But of course, Kendrick’s performance was the main event, and his set – which also included appearances from Black Hippy co-stars ScHoolboy Q, Jay Rock and Ab-Soul, and from legendary early mentor Dr. Dre – proved a celebratory moment for Kendrick’s entire legacy, dating back to his good kid days and encompassing a staggering number of hits (although none from Mr. Morale) in the years since. 

Of course, the biggest spotlight moment was saved for “Not Like Us,” which Kendrick played as the set closer and ran back repeatedly – cutting his first two renditions off at the first verse’s “A Minor” line, letting the crowd (and the millions by then participating along over social media) stretch out “Minorrrrrrr” for him as he shimmied wordlessly. By the fifth time through, he had been joined on stage by dozens of well-wishers in the crowd, including NBA stars (and Cali natives) Russell Westbrook and DeMar DeRozan and members of various local gangs, with the usually opposed sets united in their love for Kendrick and for their city (and their disdain for his enemies). Kendrick even staged a group photo with all involved on stage before calling it a night, commemorating the moment as one about much more than just him – though it also was undoubtedly about him, and how he was enjoying a victory lap like few seen before in pop culture history. 

It wasn’t over yet, either. Just weeks later, on Independence Day, Kendrick released the music video for “Not Like Us” – his only song in the feud, even including “Like That,” to receive an official visual. The brilliantly composed and (of course) L.A.-set clip portrayed Kendrick as a local deity, leading public throngs of followers in chant-alongs of the by-then-hymnal chorus – and also as a family man, dancing in his home alongside fiancée Whitney as their children play behind them. While Drake had explicitly denied Kendrick’s minor-abuse allegations on record, these video images were the closest Lamar ever came to publicly responding to Drake’s domestic-abuse claims, broadcasting the message that all was good within the Lamar family unit. Also unequivocal in its messaging: the vid’s inclusion of an OVO-looking owl being beaten as a piñata, showing that “the biggest hater” had not yet risen above kicking his adversary while he was down. (The video’s July 4th release also felt like an additionally purposeful reminder of just how Not Like Us his Canadian foe remained.) Regardless, excitement around the video sent the song back to No. 1 on the Hot 100 for a second week. 

From there, things mostly went quiet in the feud, as it appeared that Kendrick was already turning his focus to 2025. In September, the rapper was announced as the headliner of the upcoming Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, via an Instagram video in which Lamar hyped up his performance (and perhaps implied that he would not be running back his Drake beef: “You only get one shot at the championship, no Round Twos”). The announcement was met with some controversy over the fact that the NFL did not first reach out to Drake’s old mentor (and Big Easy icon) Lil Wayne for the gig – despite the fact that the Big Game’s host city and the hometown of its chosen halftime performer have only ever matched a few times in the show’s 30-plus years of pop headliners – but also a great amount of excitement over how the most victorious performer of 2024 might cap his year-long W on the Super Bowl stage.

If Kendrick’s year had ended there, he would still have had a strong case for being the Greatest Pop Star of 2024. He was the co-protagonist (and eventual conquering hero) in the biggest music-world story of 2024, and his renown only seemed to multiply in the months that followed. He had two Hot 100 No. 1 hits to his claim, including the biggest pop hit of his career – and by many accounts, including the Billboard staff’s eventual own list, the best pop song of the year – in “Not Like Us.” He could claim several of the year’s defining cultural moments. And he was already headed for a triumphant start to 2025 – not just with the Super Bowl, but as was announced in early November, likely the Grammys as well, where “Not Like Us” and “Like That” were up for a combined seven nominations, including song and record of the year for the former. If there was one remaining hole in his resumé, it was simply a question of volume, as he’d only officially released four total songs in 2024 to that point – a low number for a Greatest Pop Star, especially in a year where several of the top candidates released full new albums. 

But wouldn’t you know it: Kendrick Lamar was about to check that box as well. At noon on Friday, Nov. 22, with absolutely no warning – and no reason to suspect that anything was even on the horizon – Kendrick dropped GNX to streaming services and digital retailers. The 12-track set of all new material swept through the internet like wildfire, proving the excitement for Kendrick’s 2024 had not abated in the months following the Pop Out. The set drew rapturous reviews from fans and (mostly) the same from critics – the day of its release, esteemed Stereogum writer Tom Breihan declared that he was already “ready to tell you that it’s the best album of 2024 and the greatest work of Kendrick Lamar’s career.” The commercial response was similarly effusive: GNX debuted atop the Billboard 200 with 319,000 units moved – the best number for a hip-hop set in 2024, despite coming with no physical release – and blanketed the entire top five of the Hot 100, including Kendrick’s third No. 1 of 2024 with the set’s “Squabble Up.” 

More noteworthy in size than the set’s numbers was its overall feeling. Kendrick had gone big with his albums before, but rarely quite so mass-appeal: Outside of its grinding and grumbling opener “Wacced Out Murals,” GNX was easily his most accessible work since at least DAMN., and probably of his whole career. The floor-filling “Squabble Up” was propelled by a sample from Debbie Deb’s ‘80s freestyle classic “When I Hear Music,” the lush “Luther” floated over a hook borrowed from Luther Vandross’ version of “If This World Were Mine” (with help from superstar collaborator and former labelmate SZA) and the inflammable “TV Off” practically baited TikTok to make it go viral, with its “Not Like Us”-reminiscent Mustard beat and Kendrick’s impossibly memeable “MUSTAAARRRRD!!!” mid-song yawp. None of the three songs felt like compromises or concessions – they were all quintessentially Kendrick, and reminded of past beloved hits, even if they now listed top 40-conquering superproducer Jack Antonoff in their credits – but it was still a little stunning to hear them all on the same LP. Tellingly, in their first three weeks on the Hot 100, the three songs remained in the top 10, and each took turns as the highest-ranking song from the set. 

GNX merely confirmed what his entire 2024 to that point had already pretty clearly suggested: This was the year that Kendrick Lamar really decided to go for it. He had hardly ever been a shrinking violet to that point – he was responsible for some of the grandest artistic statements, biggest hit songs (and weightiest accompanying videos) and largest-scale live performances we had seen in the last decade. But most, if not all of it, did seem to come with the slightest bit of hesitation, the push-pull many major artists go through when faced with the prospect of total pop ubiquity: Kendrick likely desired a level of mainstream success and recognition commensurate with his level of acclaim from hip-hop heads and critics, but did he want it enough to accept everything else that came with it? Maybe not always; even as recently as “Euphoria” this year, he was sneering at Drake, “Only you like being famous.” And so he would often pull his pop star punches, refusing to play the mainstream game, disappearing from visibility for long stretches. 

But not this year. This year, starting with “Like That,” he was all the way in, and when he saw an opportunity available to him, he immediately put that motherf–ker in a headlock. Whether it was Drake and his continued rap reign that so inspired him, or whether it was the relatively muted reception to his (absolutely underrated) Mr. Morale that got his blood up, or if simply after 15 years of “ha[ving] this b–ch jumpin’” he decided it was time to prove beyond a doubt who the game’s true alpha dog was – or some combination of the three – he left no meat on the bone in 2024. There were countless moments throughout the year when Kendrick could’ve declared victory and gone back into hip-hop hibernation and no one would’ve faulted him for it, but instead, he ended the year with three Hot 100 No. 1 hits, the year’s most-acclaimed and biggest-debuting rap album, seven Grammy nominations and a booked gig on the world’s biggest stage. That’s what the truly great ones do – or, more to the point, what they don’t do: content themselves with “good enough” or even “great enough” when there’s all-time potential on the table. 

And Kendrick’s year was easily an all-timer. It’d have to be to rise to the top of these rankings in 2024, an all-time spectacular year for pop stardom. It’s unquestionably the greatest year a rapper has had this decade – reminding that rappers even can still have years this big at a time when the crossover paths to pop-level success are simply not as open as they were 5-10 years ago – and on the shortlist of the best years a rapper has had this entire century. It is certainly the most all-around triumphant: No other rapper has ever toppled a foe this mighty in such spectacular fashion and, at least in the short term, assumed his turf in the process. While Kendrick commanded the entire top five of the Hot 100 at once this year – something that previously only Drake had done among MCs – none of the 6 God’s own post-beef releases have even graced the top 25. And it’s hard to remember a single other artist from any genre who stopped the world as many times in one year as Kendrick has in 2024: Each of “Like That,” “Not Like Us,” The Pop Out and GNX made for an iconic cultural moment that fans will remember with piercing clarity and still-visceral excitement decades down the line.

There’s still no real end to the victory-lapping in sight, either. Beyond the Super Bowl and the Grammys, Kendrick also announced a co-headlining 2025 stadium tour alongside SZA – a live scale neither of the other “Big Three” have ever attempted – taking him to the biggest venues in North America through the entire Spring. Meanwhile, the three GNX hits remain three of the very biggest non-holiday entries on the Hot 100, meaning they should also be three of the biggest No. 1 contenders on the chart as 2025 gets underway – and they may soon be joined by a fourth in SZA’s just-released, Kendrick-featuring “30 for 30,” which is already dominating DSPs. And who’s to say what totally new material he may soon be inspired to drop – especially considering his mural just got wacced out again? By the time his next year is over, we may need to stop comparing him to other rappers and start comparing him solely to Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. It just goes to show: Sometimes when you pop out, you end up the Greatest Pop Star of ‘em all.

See the rest of our top 10, along with our Honorable Mentions and Rookie and Comeback of the Year artists all right here — and our podcast episode about both Kendrick and Sabrina’s top-two 2024 runs and the thinking behind their rankings here — and see you for plenty more Greatest Pop Stars in 2025!

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard has been counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 for the last week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 2, we remember the year in Sabrina Carpenter — a breakout year that cemented her as one of pop’s leading lights of the decade. (Check back today at 2:00 p.m. ET for our No. 1 artist reveal and essay, as well as our new Greatest Pop Stars podcast discussing both of our top two artists and the thinking behind their rankings.)

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What do Jesus and Sabrina Carpenter have in common? For one, “Jesus was a carpenter,” as the sassy singer-songwriter said in 2023 to Variety. But secondly, by now both have successfully turned water into wine. After relationship drama dragged Carpenter into the limelight just three years ago, Sabrina regained control of her public image — and after years of hard work, a string of smash hits and a no-misses album propelled Carpenter to superstardom in 2024, cementing her status as America’s newest sweetheart.

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Carpenter was already a viral sensation going into this year: her 2023 made her one of the most promising breakthrough pop acts, mainly due to her showmanship and spicy sense of humor. It felt as if everyone was waiting in anticipation for each newly penned outro to live performances of her breakout hit “Nonsense” — some of which were delivered on her Emails I Can’t Send Tour, and some during her highly anticipated opening sets at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, where some attendees showed up in full Sabrina-inspired, heart cutout-corseted outfits. Her retro aesthetics, carefully curated performances and suggestive lyrics captivated real-life audiences around the world and charmed the internet.

The pint-sized pop purveyor’s rise to superstardom kicked into gear with the release of her first 2024 single. Approximately one month after her final Eras date in Singapore, Carpenter released “Espresso” and its corresponding sun-soaked music video on April 11. The laid-back synth-pop bop made major waves upon release, debuting at No. 7 and marking Carpenter’s first-ever Hot 100 top 10 debut – but this was only the beginning. The song took on its own life as fans extracted their favorite pieces, from the borderline nonsensical “That’s that me espresso” tease of the chorus to the “I’m working late/ ‘Cuz I’m a singerrrr” flex of the second verse, which was so catchy and fun to sing that it transcended the need for relatability. Both phrases entered the 2024 pop culture lexicon, with memes and short form video trends attached.

The world became hooked on “Espresso” — and true to her lyrics, Carpenter was working late. As the single grew, she promoted it in seemingly every way possible. The first major performance took place almost immediately following the song’s release (April 12) on Coachella’s main stage, where she drew massive crowds and performed an otherwise Emails-heavy set; about a month later on May 18, Carpenter performed “Espresso” and “Feather” (with a “Nonsense” outro, by then a trademark bit) on Saturday Night Live; and on June 22, the song peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100. By the end of the season (and to no one’s surprise), “Espresso” was declared the global song of the summer. 

Fans were still sipping on that “me espresso” when Short n’ Sweet was announced on June 3 — and just two days later, its second single (and accompanying music video) “Please Please Please” arrived. The Jack Antonoff-produced, shimmering strutter introduced Carpenter’s newer fans to the higher end of her vocal range, and introduced the masses to her newfound country twang. Only a week after debuting at No. 2, the single became Carpenter’s first-ever No. 1 on the Hot 100.

“Please Please Please” was also the first relatable hit of the Short n’ Sweet cycle — and “Heartbreak is one thing, my ego’s another/ I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherf—ker” became the plea of the summer, foreshadowing the end of Carpenter’s relationship with video co-star and Saltburn actor (and at the time, boyfriend) Barry Keoghan. It also soundtracked one of the most viral relationship disasters of 2024: the live coupling (and uncoupling) of Love Island USA contestants Kaylor Martin and Aaron Evans. Once again, Carpenter’s single became attached to big pop culture moments.

By the time Short n’ Sweet arrived on August 23, “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” were dominating the summer — and as if having two successful singles wasn’t enough, Carpenter deemed one more track worthy of single status: “Taste,” the album’s opening track. Was it about her fling with Shawn Mendes after he separated from Camila Cabello? Rumors flew and conspiracies were formed as fans scrambled to piece together clues — but truthfully, it might not have mattered, because the video had legs of its own. This time, Carpenter tapped a new actor: Wednesday star Jenna Ortega. The two engaged in a bloody catfight inspired by the film-turned-musical Death Becomes Her, expanding Carpenter’s man-slaughtering cinematic universe, previously introduced in the “Feather” video. “Taste” debuted at No. 2 on the Hot 100, leading to Carpenter simultaneously placing three songs in the top 10 for eight weeks – an achievement which put her in the ranks of Justin Bieber and The Beatles.

With just 12 tracks – two of which fans had already heard – Carpenter proved that she was here to stay. Featuring the help of an Avengers-level group of collaborators, including producers-to-the-stars Jack Antonoff and Ian Kirkpatrick, and longtime top 40 hit writers Amy Allen and Julia Michaels, Sabrina’s refreshingly honest approach to pop felt more refined than ever. The dreamlike, sparkling soundscapes first previewed on “Please Please Please” underscored the playful femininity on highlights like “Bed Chem”; the vulnerable lyricism of the Emails era comes through in ballads like “Lie to Girls” and “Dumb & Poetic”; and the country twang previewed on “Please Please Please” finds its full yeehaw potential on “Slim Pickins.”

The Short n’ Sweet album was compact as its title promised, but the Tour of the same name was much bigger-scale. From September 23 to November 15, Carpenter brought her album to life across 29 venues in the US. Her last Emails Tour visited mid-size venues; this time around, she sold out Madison Square Garden and Crypto.com Arena. The massive leap between stages, though intimidating for some, looked easy for Carpenter, as she breezed through each show with her 1950s pin-up-inspired outfit changes, playful gimmicks and (of course) plenty of innuendos. 

Just as “Nonsense” became the viral moment of the Emails tour, Short n’ Sweet had an even bigger moment with “Juno.” Ahead of its performance each night, Sabrina whipped out a pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs to arrest (and hit on) an audience member – some of which were lucky fans, and some of which were celebrities, including Millie Bobby Brown, Rachel Sennott, Margaret Qualley and SNL’s Marcello Hernandez, acting as “Domingo,” the homewrecking hottie from an “Espresso”-based parody skit. Regardless of the subject, the banter that took place went viral almost every time – even separately from the performance of “Juno” itself, which became the 2024 cutesy Kama Sutra. Deafening screams nearly drowned out Carpenter’s vocals as she laid down, bent over or pulled her hair back to demonstrate a new sex position, asking the crowd: “Have you ever tried this one?” And while some critics insisted that the 25-year-old singer should not be mimicking such acts in front of her age-diverse crowd – eye roll – her fans couldn’t get enough.

Sabrina Carpenter

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By November, Sabrina had taken over everything from the charts, to the radio, to the internet – and then the 2025 Grammy nominations dropped. After building her career for ten years (debut single “Can’t Blame A Girl for Trying” was released in 2014), Sabrina received her first Grammy acknowledgements – six of them, including all four of the Big Four categories: best new artist, album of the year, record of the year and song of the year. In a crowded release year with constant competition for the spotlight, Carpenter broke through the noise for her biggest year yet.

And even as the year winds down, Sabrina is still motoring full speed ahead. She closed out 2024 with her own fun and flirty holiday special on Netflix, the star-studded A Nonsense Christmas, featuring duets with Chappell Roan, Tyla, Shania Twain, and Kali Uchis – and just released her NPR Tiny Desk performance, which served as a six-song victory lap celebrating her string of 2024 successes. 

But despite her chart achievements, co-signs and accolades, what sets Sabrina apart from the other pop stars of the year is that she’s both widely adopted and undeniably cool. The “cool” factor is what brought the likes of Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner, Selena Gomez and Cara Delevingne to her tour; attracted collaborations from some of the hottest brands including Marc Jacobs, Skims and Versace; helped Sabrina notch a series of team-ups with one of her inspirations, Christina Aguilera; engaged over 263,000 voters on the Short n’ Sweet Tour; and landed varied covers on Paper, TIME, W and Cosmopolitan magazines. 

Still, it feels as if there is so much more on the horizon. With the European leg of the Short n’ Sweet Tour on the horizon, plus headlining performances scheduled at Primavera Sound festival and BST Hyde Park, we at least know that we will be seeing more “Juno” positions as Carpenter crosses the pond – and who knows, maybe even more big miracles from the fun-size star to come in 2025.

See the rest of our top 10, along with our Honorable Mentions and Rookie and Comeback of the Year artists all right here — and then come back for the announcement of our No. 1 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 at 2:00 p.m. ET!

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 3, we remember the year in Taylor Swift — another historic 12 months for the unquestioned biggest pop star of the 2020s.

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Taylor Swift ended with a finale, then another, then another. That’s how the last surprise song of the Eras Tour played out, at the record-setting trek’s final performance on Dec. 8 in Vancouver: sitting down at a piano adorned with decorative flowers, Swift performed a mash-up of “Long Live” and “New Year’s Day” — the closing tracks on Speak Now and Reputation, respectively — as the parting acoustic performance of the stadium trek.She oscillated between verses, then choruses, mixing images of gratitude and hushed togetherness in the middle of thousands of breathless fans. 

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Then, Swift added one more coda: the outro of “The Manuscript,” the final song on this year’s The Tortured Poets Department. “Now and then, I re-read the manuscript,” Swift sang to close out the acoustic medley, “but the story isn’t mine anymore.” The echoing piano notes and bittersweet remembrances of “The Manuscript” stand in stark contrast with the final song on 2022’s Midnights, the Tortured Poets predecessor: on “Mastermind,” Swift portrays herself as the ultimate puppet master of romance, as synth-pop hooks function like gears in an immaculately constructed machine. 

Shortly after the aching few seconds of “The Manuscript” in Vancouver, Swift was performing “Mastermind” as part of the Midnights set, commanding her dancers around the middle of the stage like pieces on a literal chess board – pristine pop maximalism after lump-in-throat intimacy. No other artist on the planet can navigate that tonal juxtaposition so effortlessly, and have it define another impossibly successful year.

Swift’s 2023 was awe-inspiring, the type of monumental career year where you could name a handful of different defining accomplishments — from the launch of Eras to “Anti-Hero” becoming her longest-leading Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit to “Cruel Summer” receiving a viral explosion to a pair of enormous Taylor’s Version releases — and still leave a dozen others on the table. She was named our editorial staff’s Greatest Pop Star of 2023, after winning in 2021 and 2015 before that – the only artist to top our list twice in three years, and three times total. Swift was the biggest star on the planet when 2023 began, and by the end, she was one of the biggest stars ever to grace this planet.

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And Swift remained at a commercial level in 2024 that none of her peers could approach, across all platforms — if this list was based solely on numbers, she would be No. 1 this year, and most years. Yet in 2024, Swift balanced the enormity of her superstardom with the most vulnerable music of her career, including songs written about the trappings of that superstardom. The heights she had reached gained greater nuance; her fans got a peek behind the curtain of the greatest show on earth. And Swift’s artistic gamble paid off handsomely, with fresh songwriting ground explored, more records broken, and a new era added, literally and figuratively, to the most sprawling show of her career.

Swift announced the April release of The Tortured Poets Department on a night where she made history: at the 2024 Grammy Awards in February, Midnights won the album of the year trophy, giving Swift a record-setting fourth career win in the category (after Fearless, 1989 and Folklore). The revelation came out of nowhere, as Swift had been on the Eras tour since March 2023, with little downtime between stadium shows; most fans expected her next announcement to focus on the final two re-recorded albums in her back catalog, after Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) became chart-topping successes in 2023.

Yet on a night where Swift was the big winner, she told the world that she was pushing forward, with her fourth new full-length in five years. “All’s fair in love and poetry,” she wrote in an Instagram post revealing the grayscale album artwork, a message and image indicating that the reigning album of the year would receive a dramatic follow-up.

When The Tortured Poets Department arrived in April, the mastermind at the end of Midnights had been shape-shifted into a self-saboteur — heartbroken at times, pissed-off at others, with scores to settle but an obligation to the megawatt life she had constructed for herself. Working once again with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, Swift refracted the warm synth-pop and rustic indie-folk of her past few projects through an even moodier prism, and the songs shrugged off radio-friendly hooks in favor of insecurities and unruly thoughts. (Of course, there was one dart aimed at top 40: “Fortnight,” the opening track featuring Post Malone, a downtempo electro-pop duet that builds into a sweeping belt-along. It begins with dejected murder fantasies and ends with dreams of an escape to the state of Florida — no, the old Taylor still can’t come to the phone.)

Tortured Poets represented a wonderfully tangled knot of emotions hoisted up to the light; it was over an hour long, and quickly became much longer, with its 16 tracks joined by 15 more on streaming services hours after its release, for a double album dubbed The Anthology. The album confounded some critics upon its release, but was roundly embraced by fans as their favorite artist’s most unguarded statement to date. And as the commercial highs of 2023 were carried into the new year, Swift dominated the charts in ways that were downright mind-boggling — she was only competing with her past self, and she was winning.

The Tortured Poets Department debuted with 2.61 million equivalent album units, including 1.91 million pure album sales — the biggest bow of the decade and numbers exceeded only by Adele in the past 20 years, the best debut of Swift’s career, coming deep in the streaming era, when these sorts of debuts weren’t supposed to be possible anymore. Meanwhile, all 31 songs on the double-album hit the Hot 100, and Swift owned the entire top 14, including “Fortnight” clocking in at No. 1. Consumption records fell, streaming charts were flooded, and the best week for vinyl sales belonged to Swift once again, after Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) set the record last year. Plenty of A-list pop projects were released before and after The Tortured Poets Department this calendar year, but Swift created a seismic event – no other artist managed even one-sixth of those first-week numbers.

And then, the album stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for months… then left, and came back… and still, eight months later, sits on top. The Tortured Poets Department has logged 17 consecutive weeks atop the albums chart, thanks in part to high demand for its physical variants, such as the recent release of The Anthology on vinyl. It’s now Swift’s longest-running No. 1 album, even breezing by era-defining blockbusters Fearless and 1989, which each posted 11 weeks in the top spot. That longevity demonstrates the increased consumer demand for all things Taylor — after all, we’re only three years removed from Evermore earning four total weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. But this is not 2021, and Swift is far more impactful now than she was even at the beginning of this decade.

The Eras Tour reached four countries at the beginning of 2024, before The Tortured Poets Department was released in April, and its setlist was revamped to include the newest era when the tour resumed in May. Through the rest of the year, the blockbuster live run included headline-grabbing surprises: Swift’s boyfriend, NFL star Travis Kelce, appearing onstage at Wembley Stadium was probably the biggest gasp-getter, but Ed Sheeran, Florence Welch and Antonoff also dropped by for guest turns; meanwhile, a thwarted terrorist attack planned for the tour’s weekend in Vienna resulted in the scheduled performances being cancelled, with Swift later calling the ordeal “devastating.”

Perhaps the most underrated accomplishment of the Eras Tour, however, was how it minted new stars, at least partly in Swift’s own image, when she wasn’t even onstage. The tour began 2024 with Sabrina Carpenter as the opening act, a former Disney Channel standout trying to secure a crossover hit; by the end of the year, Carpenter had scored several of them, from “Espresso” to “Please Please Please” to “Taste,” and has become an undeniable A-lister with top-notch lyricism as her superpower.

And as Swift concluded the Eras run in December, she did so with a lead-in from Gracie Abrams, a former best new artist Grammy nominee whose positive buzz has turned into durable hits like “That’s So True” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry.” Carpenter headlined arenas in 2024 after leaving the Eras tour, and in 2025, Abrams will do the same, with confessional singer-songwriter anthems that leave no doubt about who is her artistic north star. The next generation of Swift acolytes stretches far beyond those two artists, but their respective successes can partially be traced back to those nights winning over hundreds of thousands of concertgoers, and millions more livestreaming each date around the globe.

The conclusion of the Eras tour has coincided with more accolades for Swift, at the end of 2024 and possibly at the beginning of the next one: after becoming the artist with the most Billboard Music Award wins of all time, she might extend her album of the year Grammys record, since The Tortured Poets Department could earn her a fifth career win. Eras concluded with over $2 billion in reported ticket sales – the must-attend concert event of this century becoming the highest-grossing tour of all time, bar none – and as she is crowned Billboard’s Top Artist of 2024, fans are still speculating whether Reputation (Taylor’s Version) and her re-recorded self-titled debut will be unveiled soon, and potentially push her towards the Top Artist of 2025.

Yet another astonishing year for Swift reverberated beyond the honorifics. This year, we got a Lifetime holiday movie not-so-subtly inspired by Swift and Kelce, and an uptick in streams for The Darkness when the couple sang their song at the U.S. Open. Both candidates for president of the United States quickly responded when Swift made her endorsement of Kamala Harris — a meaningful declaration from a proud “childless cat lady” that resulted in thousands of newly registered voters. And, oh hey, she got to kiss her boyfriend after he won the Super Bowl as the entire world watched.

As she keeps working at a breakneck pace and upending expectations of her artistry, Swift exists in the very fabric of modern-day culture, to the point where it’s impossible to imagine popular music without her presence. She may never match her 2023 again, the biggest year for a solo artist over the last 40 years – but then again, who knows, this is Taylor Swift we’re talking about. 

She has figured out how to be omnipresent while still taking risks and evolving in compelling directions. Swift will continue to tell her story, while also understanding that, as the world’s biggest artist, the story isn’t hers anymore.

See the rest of our top 10, along with our Honorable Mentions and Rookie and Comeback of the Year artists all right here — and then come back for the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 4, we remember the year in Chappell Roan — who after many years of knocking on the door of pop stardom, finally broke it down in spectacular and uningnorable fashion.

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Back in 2023, while filming her “HOT TO GO!” music video in her native Missouri, Chappell Roan told a curious onlooker, “I’m just a singer, nothing crazy.” While that statement would seem like a wild undersell now, at the start of 2024, it still tracked. While her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, dropped in late September and drew rave reviews from numerous critics (including our own), it moved a modest 77,000 album equivalent units by 2023’s end, per Luminate.

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What a difference a year makes. Not only has Roan earned her first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 since then, but she’s placed seven singles on the chart, including one No. 4-peaking smash (“Good Luck, Babe!”); she netted six Grammy nominations at the 2025 ceremony, including in each of the Big Four categories; drew record-setting crowds at festivals; and saw Midwest Princess reach No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, earning a whopping 1.88 million album equivalent units in the U.S., through Dec. 12, according to Luminate. Since then, it’s been all rise, no fall.

As with many who seemingly enjoy overnight success, it took Roan years, tears and hard work to get where she is now, which she tipped to in her acceptance speech for Top New Artist at the 2024 Billboard Music Awards. “This has taken a long time to be a new artist,” she quipped with a chuckle.

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True enough. Roan originally signed with Atlantic in 2015, dropping one EP in the course of her five years on the label before being dropped from its roster. Continuing to hone her craft while working a variety of day jobs (barista, nanny), Roan began to realize that her differences from the pop pack actually made her stronger. “Once I let go of trying to be this very well-managed, put-together pop girl, it felt like everything just fell into place,” Roan told Billboard in 2022. “I leaned into the fact that my looks were tacky, and very obviously using fake diamonds and Gucci knockoffs. I leaned into my queerness for the first time. When I did that, the songs got easier to write, the shows got easier to design, and my aesthetic was finally there.”

If Roan’s campy, liberated DIY aesthetic was calcified by 2022, then 2023 saw her songcraft reach rarefied levels of confessional rawness, queer joy and delicious bawdiness – which attentive pop fans and critics caught on to (we placed Midwest Princess in the top 15 of our year-end staff picks album list). And 2024 was the year the world finally caught up to what she was doing.

Although several of her future Hot 100 entries had already been released as singles before 2024 started (“Pink Pony Club” dropped in 2020), it was her April single “Good Luck, Babe!” that put her over. Co-written with queer pop whisperer Justin Tranter (Halsey, Janelle Monae) and previous collaborator Dan Nigro (whom she’d met during her time at Atlantic, way before his breakthrough with Olivia Rodrigo), it’s a sublime, sophisticated piece of sapphic catharsis that appealed to seemingly everyone. Whether you like your pop songs belted from stadiums, rumbling throughout a sweaty warehouse or seeping out of a cellphone while you lie in bed, you were probably vibing to this song at some point this year.

New converts quickly sought out Midwest Princess for more, and Amusement Records (an Island imprint) wasted little time trotting out follow-up singles culled from it, with six of its tracks gradually infiltrating the Hot 100 this year. Two of them, “HOT TO GO!” (No. 15) and “Pink Pony Club” (No. 26), became essential 2024 anthems, with the former spawning parodies from Saturday Night Live, “Weird Al” Yankovic and this year’s touring production of The Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show. More importantly, its “Y.M.C.A.”-esque choreography inspired throngs of fans to gleefully dance along at festivals from San Francisco to Chicago to New York City.

Speaking of, when was the last time you can remember a pop singer delivering a music festival performance that had the entire internet talking? While her Coachella set created buzz in April (hard to beat leopard-print tights and an “Eat Me” shirt), Roan’s Governors Ball spot in June was a fitting fantasia for Pride Month. Decked out in Lady Liberty drag (she’s been vocal about drawing inspiration from drag queens), Roan performed an instantly iconic set that had folks in a FOMO coma for days. She followed it up by (NBD) setting an all-time attendance record for a day crowd at Lollapalooza in August – and she wasn’t even a headliner.

Televised performances at the 2024 VMAs and on SNL demonstrated to those at home that Roan has an impressive set of pipes, an inventive aesthetic and a visual clarity that we haven’t seen from a new pop star since Lady Gaga burst onto the scene in the late ‘00s. Perhaps that’s no coincidence. Like Mother Monster, Roan grew up inspired by queer culture, found liberation in gay bars and has used her platform to speak out on LGBTQ rights when they’re under fire. But even Gaga never went quite as far as the magic trick Roan pulled off on “Red Wine Supernova.” 

As is true for many pop stars (but women in particular), with increased visibility came increased scrutiny – and creepiness. On Aug. 23 via her socials, Roan criticized some fans for “predatory behavior” and “nonconsensual physical and social interactions,” begging people to respect her space. “If you’re still asking, ‘Well, if you didn’t want this to happen, then why did you choose a career where you knew you wouldn’t be comfortable with the outcome of success?’—understand this: I embrace the success of the project, the love I feel, and the gratitude I have. What I do not accept are creepy people, being touched, and being followed.” 

Despite Roan anticipating potential backlash to her statement and preemptively shooting down that logic (as well as turning off the comments section on that Instagram post), some folks still took umbrage. It seems that despite a solid decade of conversation about the ways in which news media, entertainment media and social media can (and often do) negatively affect an artist’s well-being, there’s no shortage of individuals who view celebrities predominantly as punching bags or punchlines and not people.

Roan also caught some flak for – gasp – refusing to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president (although that didn’t stop the Harris-Walz campaign from trotting out a camo hat suspiciously close to her own merch). Although she soon clarified that she fully intended to vote for the Democratic candidate in the November presidential election (“Obviously, f–k the policies of the right, but also, f–k some of the policies on the left! That’s why I can’t endorse”), some commentators faulted her for not enthusiastically endorsing Harris considering the election stakes. But let’s be real: a Roan endorsement was never going to make any difference (many celebrities did endorse Harris with little to no demonstrable payoff), and she is far from the only Gen Z liberal who voted Democrat despite feeling let down by the party. (If pressuring pop stars into feigning fealty to the Democratic Party – instead of inspiring them to get excited over a candidate — continues to be an election year strategy? Well, good luck, babe!)

All that being said, for every online commenter with a complaint (and the more popular a musician gets, there will always be people with gripes and grievances) there were plenty of fans, artists and supporters who had her back. When Roan pulled out of both All Things Go festivals, explaining that “things have gotten overwhelming” and “I need a few days to prioritize my health,” the response from ticket holders was bummed but empathetic. As an attendee at ATG at the Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, everyone I spoke to was disappointed but fully in support of her decision to place her well-being above a concert. And the drag queen dance party that took over her time slot – which included RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Yvie Oddly and NYC queen Beaujangles – turned an otherwise rainy, dreary day into an unfettered explosion of LGBTQ joy.

Beyond drag shows (and there were a LOT of Chappell Roan lip syncs at drag shows this year), Roan’s influence on LGBTQ culture was inescapable in 2024. Like Pat Benatar look-alikes at Ridgemont High, people in Chappell Roan-inspired looks held space at countless LGBTQ clubs, concerts, parades and festivals this year. (My favorite was a group of 15 people rocking 15 different Roan looks at a Greenwich Village gay bar for their friend’s 20-something birthday). Hell, sometimes the Chappell Roan look-alike in a gay bar was Chappell Roan, as was the case when the “Pink Pony Club” singer swung by Manhattan’s Pieces to catch a Queen 4 Queen drag show in June.

From the Billboard charts to countless memes to karaoke rooms, Roan’s music seemed everywhere in 2024 – but even after the 100th time, “HOT TO GO!” remains fun as hell, “Pink Pony Club” still gallops away with your heart and “Good Luck, Babe!” soars to the stratosphere. These songs are built to last, and that’s a testament to her hard work and distinct artistic vision. 

With that in mind, it’s crazy to think that we haven’t even been gifted with a brand-new Chappell Roan single since she’s reached this level of success. On SNL in November, Roan debuted “The Giver,” an as-of-yet unreleased song with a country lean. (No shocker there: slow it down and toss in a steel guitar and “Casual” is a honky-tonk weeper.) 

Was it a taste of what’s to come — is Roan joining the stampede of pop stars going country? Or is it a total outlier, a sonic feint before she strikes out elsewhere? Who knows! But if 2024 is any indication, next year should prove to be a lot more interesting for having Chappell Roan camping up our popular culture. But then again, she’s just a singer. Nothing crazy. 

Check back later today for our No. 3 Greatest Pop Star — and then come back for the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 5, we remember the year in Charli XCX — who released a career-defining masterpiece and ruled the summer (and autumn) in pop culture entirely on her own terms.

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“I’m famous but not quite.” 

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The “I Might Say Something Stupid” lyric captured the quintessential dilemma of Charli XCX’s career in the decade leading up to her 2024. After 2013 and 2014 brought the British pop purveyor a trio of ubiquitous hits, via her appearances on Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azealia’s “Fancy” and her own solo smash “Boom Clap,” it seemed like true superstardom was in the offing for her, and that shooting for anything less would’ve been selling her potential short. 

But after some more commercially minded, purposefully accessible releases met with underwhelming returns and edgier, more forward-thinking sets cemented her as both a critics’ darling and an icon for the true popheads – all without producing any crossover hits the size of her 2013-14 trio – the question lingered over Charli XCX’s whole career: Was trying for stardom and celebrity actually the thing that was selling her potential short? Would she be better off continually scrapping to be the coolest kid on top 40’s fringes, or simply reigning as the unquestioned queen of the pop underground?

In 2024, she answered that question with a third option, one that few – perhaps her least of all – would have previously believed available: She became one of the biggest stars in the world by just being herself, but like, way moreso. Brat saw Charli XCX condense everything fans had come to love about her in the prior decade, regardless of release – the colossal pop hooks, the hair-flipping (and occasionally bird-flipping) attitude, the self-referential winking, the melted-bubblegum production, the almost uncomfortably intimate moments of vulnerability or sensuality – and turned the volume on all of it up to 365, while also inviting the entirety of her social and professional circles to join in the party. The result was a year that proved that Charli never actually had to choose between her populist and her futurist impulses; she just needed to indulge all of it at once on the biggest scale possible, and the rest of the globe would be powerless to resist the brightness of her supernova. 

Easier said than done, of course, and Charli needed to spend the early parts of 2024 lighting the fuse for that kind of ignition. She DJ’ed a much-hyped Boiler Room set in February that signaled that her new project was going to be a reconnection with her club roots – following the self-consciously radio-oriented jams of her 2022 LP Crash, which failed to establish her as a leading pop hitmaker but did get her into the top 10 of the Billboard 200 (and No. 1 on her home country’s Official Charts) for the first time. The filmed open set also introduced fans to the cast of characters who would play big supporting roles both in her increasingly extended universe – including longtime producer and co-writer A. G. Cook, newer collaborator (and recently confirmed fiancé) George Daniel of The 1975, film star and fellow It GIrl Julia Fox, and TikTok phenom turned pop aspirant (and Charli muse) Addison Rae – all of whom were raving (and sometimes taking turns spinning) in the not-quite-booth with her. 

Then, a slow trickle of singles and videos, starting with the zooming synths and strutting vocals of “Von Dutch.” The song was a chest-puffer and a s–t-talker from its opening seconds: “It’s OK to just admit that you’re jealous of me… It’s so obvious, I’m your number one.” It was a clear statement of intent – though the actual intent maybe wasn’t totally clear yet, the statement part was what was important, as the purposefulness of it as an era kickoff was unignorable. Second single “360” doubled down with a timeless bubbling synth-pop riff and insidious vocal hooks that saw her further positioning herself as the super-strength Charli the Dancefloor Slayer: “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia,” “Legacy is undebated/ You gon’ jump if A. G. made it.” (That’s Fox and Cook in the lyrics there, respectively; you’d know if you’d been following along.) 

Just as important a part of the pre-album rollout was Charli’s second takes on “Von Dutch” and “360.” The single redos each welcomed big-name guests – the previously mentioned Rae on “Von Dutch,” dismissing the haters who still end up adding to her view counts, and the cult-pop queen Robyn and cloud-rap paragon Yung Lean on “360,” both following Charli’s “I’m your favorite reference” lead with sung-spoken lyrics bigging up their own legacies (“Started so young, I didn’t even have email/ Now my lyrics on your booby”). Everything about the remixes, from their guests to their content to their matter-of-fact titling (e.g. “360 Featuring Robyn & Yung Lean”), clearly projected: Pay attention to what I’m doing here, because I’m going to be returning to it later. 

First, though, it was time for the curtain to go up on Brat. Even before the album’s June release, Brat had already become a minor pop culture phenomenon, just by virtue of its title and artwork, unveiled in April. The simplicity of the album title, its value-ambiguity as a self-applied label, and (most importantly) its adaptability as both a noun and adjective all made it the year’s most naturally conversational LP title. Similarly, the set’s monochromatic, near-fluorescently-bright-green cover – blank, except for the centered, all-lowercase and slightly out-of-focus album title – proved divisive among fans, but quickly internet-iconic, and a magnetic jumping-off point for assorted memery. All the while, a frequently repainted wall in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood – ultimately known as the “Brat Wall” – would provide an informal weather forecast for Charli’s next moves on the pre-album campaign, electrifying social media on a semi-weekly basis with its new art developments.

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If there were any remaining doubts that the music could live up to the memes with Brat, the album put them to bed on first listen. Much of the LP followed in the hyperkinetic, living-that-life mold of “Von Dutch” and “360,” with the latter opening the set and even getting bookended with twin closer “365,” an even-more-explicit anthem of party-girl decadence. But fans were less prepared for the emotional depths the set would plumb, with Charli exploring her own professional insecurities (“Sympathy Is a Knife,” “Rewind”), her major life decisions (“I Think About It All the Time”) and even her fraught relationship with close collaborator SOPHIE in the years before her death (“So I”), all with disorienting honesty and directness. These songs went for the heart and the gut, but without sacrificing the ass – aside from “So I,” the lone mid-album ballad breather, even the record’s most brutal cuts were still delivered in service of the dancefloor, making Brat endlessly re-bumpable.

Brat became consumed by pop culture so quickly following its release that it can be easy – though maybe not that easy, given how many year-end critics’ lists it ultimately topped, including the Billboard staff’s own – to lose track of what a tremendous artistic accomplishment it really was. It’s easy to make an album for the club, but it’s exceptionally difficult to make an album that feels like it itself is the club: the venue, the DJ, the dancefloor and the entire guest list. And while Brat obviously lets any number of Charli’s fabulous famous friends past the velvet rope for its 41 minutes of id-stroking self-celebration, it remembers that any true club night also includes the girl hiding in the back because she’s convinced herself she’s worn the totally wrong outfit, and the friends busy gossiping and scrolling Instagram while waiting in line for the bathroom, and the couple preoccupied with dreading the ride home, because they realize they can’t avoid that conversation they’ve been avoiding any longer. It all made for an impossibly rich and immersive LP experience, one that stayed challenging and unpredictable and still thoroughly, peerlessly exciting and satisfying throughout. 

And as it turns out, it was just the beginning. Brat was an immediate success, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 – Charli’s first top-five showing on the chart – and vaulting “360” onto the Hot 100 for the first time, at a modest No. 73. Given those early returns, the rave reviews the album received and the continued internet embrace of all things Brat – with the phrase “Brat Summer” already picking up steam in the media as an official epoch designation  – Charli very easily could have declared victory with her album cycle, switched her focus to touring and just let Pop Twitter take it from there. Instead, she did something that no one – not even Charli herself weeks earlier – could have seen coming. 

In truth, it wasn’t like “Girl, So Confusing Feat. Lorde” came out of nowhere. The original “Girl,” a Brat highlight, was already widely speculated to be about the New Zealand singer-songwriter – with its racing-inner-monologue lyrics about an industry maybe-peer, maybe-rival – and even included a line addressing the possibility of a someday-collaboration (“The internet would go crazy”). But that didn’t make it any less jaw-dropping when, two weeks after Brat, the “Girl” remix dropped with a brand new verse from Lorde responding to Charli’s recounting of their frenemyship, inspired by a voice note the latter had left the former just hours before Brat was formally released (though it was already out in Lorde’s home country by that point). 

Rather than muddying or overstuffing the original’s narrative, Lorde’s empathizing with Charli’s anxieties (and even addressing her own insecurities and body-image issues in the process) felt like it rounded out the song, like that was the way it was always meant to be heard. What could have amounted to a quick gossip-bait headline instead became a profound and mold-breaking statement about rising above the music industry’s inherent competitiveness and gender double-standards, in the name of simply celebrating greatness in a fellow traveler. Everything about the “Girl” redo was stunning, but no part more than the fact that it existed in the first place: a microscopically improbable connection of radical honesty and compassion between two pivotal longtime music-world fixtures, which felt like it broke the fourth wall of pop music (along with countless unspoken rules of pop star collaboration), and in doing so healed an entire generation of fans. 

Needless to say, the internet did go crazy. “Girl” enraptured social media, who made quick meme work out of Lorde’s instantly catchphrase-spawning “Let’s work it out on the remix” declaration, and sent the song onto the Hot 100 for the first time the following week. Even Kyle MacLachlan, 65-year-old acting alum of Twin Peaks and Sex and the City, posted a video of himself in a Brat-green shirt singing (and acting) along to Lorde’s verse. And as Brat Summer kicked into high gear in July – with the album’s “Apple” taking off as a dance challenge on TikTok, about to push the song onto the Hot 100 to join “360” and “Girl” – another unlikely event was about to push Charli’s year in an entirely new direction. 

On July 21, the world was stunned by the announcement that President Joe Biden, under pressure from the democratic party following a disconcerting debate performance, had officially decided not to pursue re-election that November. With Biden out of the race, the likely democratic frontrunner for the position was now vice president Kamala Harris, and Charli – a concerned onlooker if not herself a U.S. citizen – offered her support for the presumed candidate the best way she knew how: with the three-word tweet “kamala IS brat.” The message may not have been delivered with grand intentions, but the combination of excitement over Harris’ freshening up what had been a moribund campaign season and of continued Brat Summer delirium turned it into one of the week’s primary news talking points, as FOX News and CNBC anchors attempted to wrap their heads around the full implications of “Brat” as a descriptor.

Two months after Brat’s release, the album was still only gaining momentum – and it would get another injection at the top of August. Charli had begun hinting at a new remix, which fans quickly determined was to feature alt-pop superstar Billie Eilish, still hot off her own glowingly received Hit Me Hard and Soft album. Despite being easily the biggest artist Charli had yet recruited for a Brat second-spin, Eilish was tabbed not for one of the album’s streaming hits, but for “Guess,” a flirty bonus cut from the Brat and It’s the Same But There’s Three More Songs So It’s Not deluxe edition. The choice ended up making sense, as Eilish – who had recently begun to embrace a more forward and explicit queerness in her own music – was posited as the leering responder to Charli’s underwear-based teasing, taking the song to a new level of sapphic, conspiratorial fun. Helped by a music video which featured the pair scaling a mountain of discarded panties, “Guess Featuring Billie Eilish” became the biggest chart hit of Charli’s 2024, hitting No. 13 on the Hot 100. 

As Brat Summer was coming to an end – at least by official calendar designation – Charli maintained her grip on the culture, scoring another Hot 100 hit alongside longtime collaborator Troye Sivan on a redo of “Talk Talk.” The timing of the song’s release was undoubtedly also in part to trumpet the beginning of the pair’s co-headlining Sweat Tour, which brought the Brat experience to arenas throughout the country. While pre-Brat, the tour was speculated to have been a low seller in many markets, by the time of the autumn trek, the dates were all sold out – with Charli quote-tweeting one of the early viral tweets about its initial underperformance in a post about the tour’s final show. That September, Charli was even deemed pop culture presence enough to be given her own fake SNL “Talk Talk Show,” with a perfectly accented and coiffed Bowen Yang playing Charli (and Sarah Sherman playing her DJ sidekick Sivan). 

And there was still one major moment to go in the Brat cycle. October saw the much-anticipated release of the Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat companion album – which collected the five Brat redos Charli had already released, and added new versions of the album’s 11 previously unremixed tracks, each with at least one recognizable collaborator. Once again, rather than coasting on the buzz from the pre-existing remixes – or simply collecting as many big-name guests as she could – Charli scripted every remix to not only expand the meaning and resonance of her own set, but also add new shading to our pre-existing perceptions of the guests involved. “B2b” invited fellow should-be-bigger pop vet Tinashe (in the midst of her own 2024 comeback moment) to flex about the work it takes to still be so fabulous, “I Might Say Something Stupid” gave a post-Taylor Swift Matty Healy free reign to ruminate on cancellation (and/or erectile dysfunction?) for four minutes, and “Sympathy Is a Knife” lent Ariana Grande a platform to voice her frustrations about the ownership fans and the media try to claim over her. The entire set was so thick with drama and character development that it felt less like a remix album and more like a Bratverse theatrical production. 

It was all incredibly powerful stuff, not the least of all because Charli never let novelty overshadow emotional impact on the set. While the biggest names on Completely Different understandably made for the biggest headlines, the most rewarding cuts were the most unexpected – like Caroline Polacheck moaning about the “f–king foxes” and sharing a moment of late-night panic with Charli on the new “Everything Is Romantic,” or mutual collaborator A. G.  Cook helping Charli turn the mournful original “So I” into an uptempo tribute to “all the good times” with SOPHIE, with the vivid details of their many shared experiences popping like fireworks of bittersweet nostalgia. Unlike 99% of pop and dance remix albums throughout history – which are more often than not both delivered and received as near-afterthoughts – Completely Different stood up in every way to the original, not only complementing Brat but enriching it, making it feel deeper and more vital by extension. 

Charli ended the year by essentially sweeping list season, and scoring seven Grammy nominations for 2025 – including album of the year for Brat and record of the year for “360” – while also pulling double-duty as both host and performer on SNL in November. All of it confirmed that after a decade of tenuous flirtation with the American mainstream, she was now officially at the very center of both the music industry and of general pop culture in this country. She did not reach the commercial heights of other artists on this list in 2024: Brat never bettered its No. 3 debut on the Billboard 200, and no song from any of its incarnations ever touched the Hot 100’s top 10 — none from the original album ever even reached the top 40. But in terms of sheer cultural ubiquity, impact and reach, Charli could rival absolutely anyone; even former President Obama was bumpin’ that this summer. 

And perhaps more importantly, Charli taught the entire pop world an extremely valuable lesson this year: It is indeed possible to achieve all of your loftiest ambitions as an artist without compromising a single thing about what really makes your artistry so singular. It takes a f–king whole lot of work and intention and focus and ingenuity – and maybe it also takes a solid decade of tinkering with your own sound and image and collaborators first until you finally get everything to align. But if you have the patience, and if you have the vision – and most critically, if you have the drive to not let any possible opportunities to be great pass you by — then you really can get the pop world to come meet you where you are. And then, like the Brat Wall, you will always be famous. 

Check back tomorrow for our Nos. 4 and 3 Greatest Pop Stars — and then come back for the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars from 2024 all this week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 6, we remember the year in Ariana Grande — who made major impact in the worlds of music, television and film in 2024, not to mention across the whole internet.

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Ariana Grande began 2024 less like her bubbly Wicked character Galinda Upland and a bit more like her embattled counterpart, Elphaba Thropp. She might not have been Public Enemy No. 1 for everybody, but Grande was social media’s main course at the onset of her Eternal Sunshine era. 

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After the turbulent Positions rollout, Grande paused her habit of churning out new full-length in almost yearly fashion and prioritized auditioning for – and eventually filming – Wicked. In July 2023, news broke that Grande and her ex-husband Dalton Gomez had separated at the top of the year and were planning to legally end their two-year marriage. Days later, reports swirled that Grande had begun dating Ethan Slater, her Tony-winning Wicked co-star. Slater, in turn, filed for divorce from Lilly Jay, his wife of five years and mother of their son, less than ten years later. Though Grande and Slater began dating after their respective marriages were over — both divorces were legally finalized in time for the Wicked premiere – the chaotic timeline led social media to unfairly cast Grande as the mean girl homewrecker who’d destroyed a happy family. 

Grande, for her part, kept her lips sealed regarding her romantic life, which made her first musical statement 2024 all the more powerful. On Jan. 12, Grande her first solo single in four years: a sassy, house-rooted kiss-off called “Yes, And?” A direct response to the Internet noising marring her name (“Why do you care so much whose d—k I ride?”), the song brought Grande back to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 – a spot she did visit twice in the time between Positions and Eternal Sunshine, but only as a special remix guest of star collaborator The Weeknd – with the first new No. 1 single of 2024. Culturally, the song had a much softer presence in the lexicon in comparison to past Grande smashes like “Thank U, Next” or “Problem,” but even before its eventual Mariah Carey remix and Grammy nomination (best dance pop recording), “Yes, And?” did what Grande needed it to: effectively shift the conversation away from her personal life and to her music. 

Inspired by her marriage and its dissolution, as well as Michael Gondry’s 2004 Oscar-winning film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Grande’s seventh studio album finds her delivering some of the sharpest and most poignant songwriting of her career. Crafted alongside longtime collaborators Max Martin and Ilya with Grande writing music and lyrics on each track, Eternal Sunshine uses Gondry’s film and the astrological concept of the Saturn Return (the period of a person’s late 20s and early 30s, during which they face real adult challenges for the first time) to help Grande make peace with the perceived failure of love. The record blends pop, R&B, house and slight dashes of wistful acoustic guitar, which beautifully complement the depth of Grande’s post-Wicked voice. 

On March 23, Eternal Sunshine debuted atop the Billboard 200, earning the largest U.S. opening-week total of 2024 at the time (227,000 units) and setting the record for the most-streamed album in a single day in 2024 on Spotify at the time (58.1 million). All 12 chart-eligible songs debuted on the Hot 100, including “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait For Your Love),” an evocative, dancefloor tearjerker that led the way as the album’s focus track, becoming Grande’s ninth Hot 100 chart-topper. Thanks to Eternal Sunshine, Grande became just the second woman in Billboard history (after Taylor Swift) to simultaneously top the Artist 100, Hot 100, Billboard 200, Hot 100 Songwriters, and Hot 100 Producers charts. 

Two months after the album’s release, Grande performed a private set for MET Gala attendees. In addition to renditions of her biggest hits, she also invited Wicked co-star Cynthia Erivo onstage to cover Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey’s “When You Believe” — a smart bookend to the pair’s matching Super Bowl fits (where they debuted the film’s first trailer) and a peek at the rousing phenomenon the film would become. 

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In addition to “We Can’t Be Friends,” which earned a VMAs win for best cinematography, Grande found further single success in “The Boy Is Mine.” After originally peaking at No. 18 after the album’s release, “Boy” returned to the Hot 100 following its Catwoman-inspired music video and Brandy and Monica assisted remix, which earned the ladies a Grammy nod for best pop duo/group performance. Even though Eternal Sunshine is the only 2024 album to launch two Hot 100 No. 1 hits, neither of those songs dominated the culture like other songs that barely sniffed the top 40. There was so much else going on in the pop world that listeners moved on from Eternal Sunshine very quickly, but the album did what Grande need it to do: put the focus back on her work and off her dating life. 

After closing out the summer with a 10th anniversary re-release of her blockbuster My Everything album, Grande put a few finishing touches on her pop stardom before fully returning her attention to Wicked. She dropped an expanded version of Eternal Sunshine featuring live versions of seven tracks on Oct. 1, with an appearance on Charli XCX’s Brat remix album arriving ten days later. Charli tapped Grande for a reimagining of “Sympathy Is a Knife,” a refreshingly honest look at fame and insecurity cast across a hyperpop soundscape. Ultimately, “Sympathy” became the second-highest charting Hot 100 entry from the Brat era and served as a low-key farewell from Ariana the Pop Star™. “’Cause it’s a knife when you’re finally on top/ ‘Cause logically the next step is they wanna see you fall to the bottom,” they harmonize in the pre-chorus. 

The day after “Sympathy” dropped, Grande hosted one of the best and most popular Saturday Night Live episodes of the year. She already served as musical guest while promoting Eternal Sunshine at the top of this year, but this was the first time she had hosted since 2016. Between her dazzling opening monologue, ace Jennifer Coolidge impression, and the hilarious Antonio and Domingo sketches, Grande’s Oct. 12 SNL episode earned the program its highest ratings in three years and became the most-watched SNL episode ever on Peacock in just two days. With her vocal virtuosity and acting chops – she even successfully played a bad singer in the viral Domingo sketch — at the forefront of the general public’s mind, Grande had perfectly positioned herself for Wicked to be her crowning moment of the year. And “Just Like Magic,” that’s exactly what happened. 

After a whirlwind global press tour that delivered gorgeous looks and memes galore — “Holding space,” anybody? Maybe the constant crying rings a bell? — Wicked, helmed by John M. Chu and also starring Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey and Jeff Goldblum – debuted atop both the domestic ($114 million) and global ($164.2 million) box offices, with the largest opening ever for a film based on a Broadway musical. Wicked, the first of a two-part film adaptation of the 2004 Tony winner, has made over $525 million worldwide, becoming one of the highest-grossing films in 2024. Grande earned rapturous reviews for her performance in the film, with her comedic timing, vocal tenacity and physical commitment to the character’s journey helping her win over the film industry the same way she captivated the music industry. In addition to several honors from critics groups, Grande has emerged as a formidable front-runner in the best supporting actress Oscar race in her first-ever major starring film role, earning nominations at both the Golden Globes and Critic’s Choice Awards for her turn as Glinda. 

Of course, Wicked’s success will always be tied to his music, and Grande also handily upheld that legacy. In December,  Wicked: The Soundtrack (billed to Grande, Erivo and Various Artists) debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, marking the highest debut for a soundtrack of a musical stage-to-film adaptation. The set also entered at the summit of Top Album Sales, Top Soundtracks and Vinyl Albums, and sent seven of its songs to the Hot 100, including Grande’s solo track “Popular” (No. 53)”- -making for a sweet full-circle moment after she interpolated the showtune on “Popular Song” (with MIKA) from her 2013 debut album. 

To end the year with a RIAA Platinum-certified and triple-Grammy-nominated No. 1 album in one hand a film that grossed half a billion dollars in the other – with an Oscar nomination also seemingly right at your fingertips — is wildly impressive. It’s even more extraordinary when you remember that 11 months ago it felt like practically nobody was on Grande’s side. But that’s the eternal challenge of pop stardom, and in 2024, Ariana Grande once again proved that she’s not only more than capable of conquering that challenge – she’s powerful enough to render her haters completely insignificant with a wave of her baby pink, crystal-encrusted wand. 

Check back later today for the reveal of our No. 5 Greatest Pop Star, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!

12/17/2024

See our editorial staff’s list for the greatest artists from an all-time year in pop stardom, rolling out throughout December.

12/17/2024

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — having already revealed our Honorable Mentions, our Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all last week, and our No. 10, No. 9 and No. 8 Greatest Pop Stars earlier this week. Now, at No. 7, we remember the year in Beyoncé — who returned with one of the year’s most ambitious albums and change the game yet again.

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

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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. 

But the songs that fans first greeted as part of Bey’s new project were not like other Beyoncé lead singles. From the opening banjos and stomping beat of “Texas,” it was clear that the rumors that had long circulated about her new LP were at least partially grounded in reality: This was going to be her country album, reclaiming the genre’s roots in Black music.

Renaissance had done the same two years earlier with club music, but as a modern pop star, Beyoncé always had at least a toe or two in dance music – she’d topped Billboard’s Dance/Club Songs chart a whopping 22 times in her career already, with various singles and remixes, by the time of that album’s release. Her history in country, however, was largely limited to one song: “Daddy Lessons,” from 2016’s Lemonade. That song was well received by fans and critics, but proved controversial within the country world; following her performance of the song at the 2016 CMA Awards (alongside the now-also-divisive The Chicks), complaints from viewers about Bey’s country qualifications flooded social media, while genre stalwart Alan Jackson reportedly had gotten up and left during the performance.  

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If there was any doubt that Beyoncé could have success within the genre, though, the two new songs – particularly the hooting, dancefloor-storming “Texas” – quickly put them to bed. “Texas” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 with just over four days of tracking in its initial release week; the following frame, helped by TikTok virality that included various line-dance challenges, the song climbed to pole position, becoming her ninth career No. 1 as a solo artist (and 13th including her work in Destiny’s Child). It also topped Hot Country Songs, making Bey the first Black woman to top the chart in its 65-year history. 

A month after, Bey announced the full parent album for the two songs, which would serve as “Act II” in the trilogy that Renaissance had kicked off: Cowboy Carter, whose cover featured Bey riding side-saddle on a white horse in full cowboy regalia, while brandishing an American flag. The album, the superstar explained in her Instagram reveal, had been “over five years in the making,” and was “born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t,” which inspired her to do a deep dive into country’s history – with the “experience” in question being assumed by most to be the 2016 CMAs performance. However, despite the project’s roots in country, Bey remained unequivocal on the album’s classification: “This ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.”

The new “Beyoncé” album arrived just a week and a half later: A 28-track journey through country’s past, present and future, Cowboy Carter was Bey’s highest-concept album yet, very deliberately paced and full of connective interludes and even paired at its bookends to essentially play in a continuous loop. It also had a guest list to match its simultaneously backwards- and forward-looking tracklist, including genre legends like Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Linda Martell, as well as rising artists like Willie Jones, Tanner Adell and Shaboozey, and even a couple lightly country-adjacent established pop stars in Miley Cyrus and Post Malone. But given the album’s explorations into both folkier and rockier territory, as well as with Bey’s usual inflections of pop and R&B across various tracks, it was true that the album’s core genre was not easily summarized by anything but the artist’s own name, now essentially a genre unto herself. 

The set was clearly an event, and it was received as one. Cowboy Carter bowed atop the Billboard 200 – continuing a streak of every official non-soundtrack LP of Bey’s topping the chart, dating back to her first 2003 solo turn Dangerously in Love – with 407,000 units moved, besting the 332,000 units posted by Renaissance in its first week and still marking the best non-Taylor Swift single-week performance for any 2024 album. What’s more, the set drew near-unanimous acclaim, with a score in the 90s from critic-aggregating website Metacritic, making it easily one of the best-reviewed sets released by any artist this year.

The biggest commercial returns for Cowboy Carter were largely kept to its first few weeks of release, as “Texas Hold ‘Em” began to slide down the Hot 100 after its two weeks on top – and though the set blanketed the chart following its debut, it failed to produce a second enduring chart hit. However, Bey remained present in the pop culture landscape following the album’s release, even officially introducing Team USA during the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies in July (with a pre-filmed bit set to Cowboy’s “Ya Ya”), and appearing in a Levis commercial – soundtracked, of course, by the album’s “Levii’s Jeans” – a couple months later. Even when Beyoncé didn’t appear somewhere, it made headlines, as at April’s Stagecoach Music Festival in California, where rumors flew that Bey would make a surprise cameo to kick off the live element of her Cowboy Carter era – sadly for naught, as the festival weekend came and went without the Queen making an official appearance.

Another arena where Beyoncé’s participation was continually anticipated this year was at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where presidential hopeful Kamala Harris was building excitement over her own somewhat surprise-announced candidacy. Harris used Lemonade’s “Freedom” as one of her campaign anthems, and in late August, reports surfaced that the pop icon would be making an appearance in support of the candidate. That didn’t come to pass, though Bey eventually would appear – alongside Destiny’s Child groupmate and fellow Texan Kelly Rowland – at a Lone Star State rally that October. “I’m not here as a celebrity… I’m not here as a politician,” she proclaimed. “I’m here as a mother. A mother who cares, deeply, about the world my children and all of our children live in… Our moment is right now. It’s time for America to sing a new song.” (Sadly, America ultimately elected to sing the same song as it did in 2016, but given the multitude of A-list endorsements Harris received – including from several other artists on this list – it suggested that the impact pop stars could have on such matters in 2024 was perhaps limited to begin with.) 

There was no doubt about the impact that Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter era had on popular music in 2024, however. Even before the LP’s release, in the weeks after the surprise drop of “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” you could already see big bumps for other Black artists in country music – including for eventual Cowboy collaborator Tanner Adell, whose streaming numbers nearly tripled in the days that followed – just based on the conversation that she was creating around the topic. And perhaps the two biggest breakthroughs in country music in 2024 could both be traced back to Bey: Post Malone, who soft-launched his country pivot on “Levii’s Jeans” before going full Nashville with his Hot 100-topping Morgan Wallen single teamup “I Had Some Help” and Billboard 200-topping full album F-1 Trillion, and Shaboozey, who made his Hot 100 bow via two tracks on Cowboy Carter right before besting the chart for a record-tying 19 weeks with his inescapable “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” 

A full quarter-century after first topping the Hot 100 with “Bills, Bills, Bills” as a member of Destiny’s Child, our editorial staff’s No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of the 21st Century remains not only basically as successful and impactful as she’s ever been, but more adventurous and risk-taking than ever. She is well on her way to being one of the culture-defining superstars of the 2020s, just as she was for the ‘00s and ‘10s; this is her third straight year in our Greatest Pop Stars top 10, with only one other artist (yet to appear on our 2024 rankings) able to boast an active streak as long. She’s not likely to disappear anytime soon, either, as she already has her much-anticipated return to the live stage on the books for halftime of the Houston Texans’ Netflix Christmas game against the Baltimore Ravens, with a possible Cowboy Carter tour expected to follow – and of course, there’s still the perpetually buzzed-about closing act to her archival album trilogy. You can bet that whenever she does plan on dropping that new music, we’ll be staying ready for it.

Check back tomorrow for our Nos. 6 and 5 Greatest Pop Stars, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — having already revealed our Honorable Mentions, our Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all last week, and our No. 10 and No. 9 Greatest Pop Star on Monday. Now, at No. 8, we remember the year in Post Malone — who resumed his old winning ways with a turn towards an entirely new genre.

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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 Jan. 1, 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.

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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.”

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The first true hint that said project was actually arriving in 2024 came in February, when Post shared a snippet of a Luke Combs collab that would become “Guy for That.” That was followed by a turn on Beyoncé’s own country project Cowboy Carter in March, with the twangy midtempo duet “Levii’s Jeans,” then a surprise Hank Williams cover at a benefit concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in April. But everything kicked into overdrive later that month at the Stagecoach Music Festival, when – following his own 11-song set of country covers, some including assists from the original artists themselves (Brad Paisley, Dwight Yoakam, Sara Evans) – Post popped back up onstage with headliner Morgan Wallen to debut a brand-new duet called “I Had Some Help.” From fan-shot videos of the Indio, California, performance, it hardly seemed like your typical new-song-at-a-festival response; by the second chorus, the crowd was singing every word as if the track had already been all over country radio.

And then it was. “I Had Some Help” officially arrived on May 10, and that cusp-of-summer release served it well, as the breezy bro duet went on to soundtrack countless pool parties and backyard barbecues, debuting at No. 1 on the Hot 100 in an incredibly crowded pop landscape (Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” were all in the top 10 that week) and holding the top spot for a robust six weeks. It also scored seven weeks at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs and four atop Country Airplay, on its way to being crowned Billboard’s 2024 Song of the Summer in September. The month-plus chart-topper ended a bit of a commercial cold spell for Posty, whose solo No. 1s had all come last decade and who hadn’t found a hit of this size since well before the pandemic.

But “Help” was just the start of Post’s country coup. In June, he announced that his first all-country album F-1 Trillion would arrive in mid-August – and released the second single from the project, a sudsy dive-bar duet with Blake Shelton called “Pour Me a Drink” that would become his second Country Airplay No. 1. In July, he unveiled the full track list, which included a who’s who of honky-tonk heavy-hitters. Only three songs on the 18-track standard album didn’t include features, and it appeared that everyone in Nashville – Dolly Parton, Hank Williams Jr., Tim McGraw, Chris Stapleton and (of course) Jelly Roll – was beyond happy to team up with the congenial hitmaker.

F-1 Trillion debuted atop the Billboard 200 following its Aug. 16 release and spent six weeks at No. 1 on Top Country Albums, with Post landing 18 songs on the Hot 100 from the project during release week. One of the many keys to the project’s colossal success appears to be the way Post fully immersed himself in the country world this year, between performing at both the ACM Awards in May and CMA Awards in November; playing Nashville’s vaunted Bluebird Café in June; and making his Grand Ole Opry debut in August, flanked by Vince Gill, John Michael Montgomery, Lainey Wilson and more country all-stars. He’s been utterly enveloped into what can sometimes be an insular space, proving yet again what a genre chameleon he can be when the musicianship, strong songwriting and love for the craft is so clearly there.

And this could have been a massive year for Post Malone even if he hadn’t successfully ingratiated himself into yet another new genre. Back in February, a day after Taylor Swift had surprise-announced a brand-new album called The Tortured Poets Department, she unveiled the project’s track list – including album opener “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone. It ended up not only being the opening track, but also the lead single, arriving alongside the album on April 19 with a cinematic black-and-white music video starring Swift and a tattoo-free Malone as ex-lovers. Post gushed about the experience on Instagram, writing, “It’s once in a lifetime that someone like @taylorswift comes into this world. I am floored by your heart and your mind, and I am beyond honored to have been asked to help you with your journey.” The song spent two weeks atop the Hot 100, and the duo accepted the video of the year prize together for “Fortnight” at September’s 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, where Malone was Swift’s right-hand man for her latest VMAs victory lap.

Malone’s awards journey might just be getting started too, because in November, he earned seven new Grammy nominations – a tie for the second-most this year – that span both his country album and his collabs with Swift and Beyoncé, and have him in good shape to finally take home his first-ever statue in 17 career tries. Next year will also mark Post’s biggest tour yet: After playing a 21-date mini-tour around F-1 Trillion this fall, the star announced the aptly titled Big Ass Stadium Tour in November, set for next April to July. 

Oh, and Post accidentally let a couple of other dates slip when he made the announcement, sharing a poster that included April 13 and 20 stops in Indio, California, with Coachella confirming the next day that Post would be back in the desert to headline alongside Lady Gaga, Green Day and Travis Scott next spring. After 2024 headlining slots at Bonnaroo, Rolling Loud, Governors Ball, Global Citizen Festival and Outside Lands that all skewed heavily toward his earlier, non-country material, it will be interesting to see what kind of similarity the Post Malone who shows up at Coachella will bear to the one who showed up at the same grounds for Stagecoach a year before.

Post Malone isn’t just diversifying when it comes to genre, either; he also made inroads in Hollywood this year, including a bloody boxer role in the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring Road House remake in March and a cheeky cameo as himself in the new Jack Black Christmas movie Dear Santa. In other big accomplishments: His 2018 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse smash “Sunflower” with Swae Lee became the first-ever double-diamond single in RIAA history in February, meaning it’s reached an equivalent of 20 million sales; that same month, he performed “America the Beautiful” ahead of the 2024 Super Bowl, which reached a record 123.7 million viewers; and he came face-to-face with his very own wax figure backstage at Gov Ball in June (even mistaking it for a real person).

As Malone wraps his epic year by dotting 2024 best-of lists (including both our best albums and best songs staff rankings), his country project ends on a high, celebrating platinum certification from the RIAA for F-1 Trillion and five-times platinum status for “I Had Some Help,” as of Dec. 12. It once again seems like everything he touches turns to gold (or, really, platinum), so as Post’s 2024 turns to his 2025, keep your eyes peeled for any wardrobe clues that might signal which part of the top 40 world he has his sights on taking over next.

Check back later today for the reveal of our No. 7 Greatest Pop Star, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — having already revealed our Honorable Mentions, our Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all last week, and our No. 10 Greatest Pop Star earlier today. Now, at No. 9, we remember the year in Billie Eilish — who continued one of the great pop star runs of the past decade with a year that felt like her really coming into her own in particularly new and rewarding ways.

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 7 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. 

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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.

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It helped that the start of her year saw spillover success from an otherwise-quiet 2023. Even in an off-cycle year, the singer-songwriter unleashed the languishing ballad “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie soundtrack, capturing a world-worn sense of ennui that could have easily eluded a 21-year-old pop singer-songwriter. For her existentialist efforts, Eilish was rewarded, taking home two more Grammys, a Golden Globe and an Oscar in 2024, breaking new records with each respective award. 

But Eilish had no intention to spend her 2024 victory-lapping. After spending the better part of two years battling writer’s block with her collaborator and big brother Finneas, Eilish found her sound — not quite the brooding alt-pop experimentation of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, nor the melodic, torch-bearing introspection of Happier Than Ever, but a nebulous middle ground between the two — and announced the impending release Hit Me Hard and Soft in April. There would be no singles, no previews, no teases: As she told Rolling Stone, “every single time an artist I love puts out a single without the context of the album, I’m just already prone to hating on it.” Instead, she insisted, the fans would just have to wait and listen. 

It was clear from that first listen that Eilish’s subversive strategy was paying off. While critics praised both of the singer’s previous LPs for their emotional frankness, Hit Me landed haymakers of honesty across each of its 10 tracks, as Eilish dissected body dysmorphia (“Skinny”), disconnection (“Chihiro”), unreciprocated affection (“The Greatest”) and the obsessive attention of fans (“The Diner”) — all topics she’d touched on before, but never with this level of in-depth self-awareness. Meanwhile, Finneas’ production took everything that worked on her last two projects, blended it all together and added in new shades to create an isolated sonic universe for Hit Me to occupy. There’s a reason both Billie and Finneas compared her album to Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die and Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory — Hit Me Hard and Soft was, in fact, an “album-ass album.” 

From the word go, it became readily apparent that the album hit hard, not soft, with fans. For the first time in her career, Eilish debuted every song from the album on the Hot 100, all of them within the chart’s top 40. She also sold a career-high 339,000 units in one week. Yes, Hit Me did become her first album not to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — but when you consider her competition was Taylor Swift’s monolithic The Tortured Poets Department, still selling 378,000 units in its fifth of 17 total weeks (and counting) atop the chart so far, it becomes clear how huge Hit Me Hard and Soft truly was.

One of the biggest stories to come out of the album’s release week, though, was the official first single announced after its release — the sexy, sapphic “Lunch.” Bearing a similar sonic bravado to her lone Hot 100 No. 1 hit “Bad Guy,” the song’s sweltering bassline kicks up under Eilish’s casually confident croon, as she opines about the pleasures of … well, pleasure. “I could eat that girl for lunch/ Yeah, she dances on my tongue/ Tastes like she might be the one,” she winks on the track. After a rocky coming out in late 2023, here was Eilish taking control of the narrative, setting the record straight (well, you get it) and saying exactly how she felt about the women around her. Plus, the fans were clearly eating “Lunch” up — the song bowed at No. 5 on the Hot 100, the highest debut on the chart in Eilish’s career.

It wouldn’t be the last time Eilish waxed poetic about the art of femme-focused seduction in 2024 either — months later, on a blockbuster remix of Charli XCX’s Brat deluxe track “Guess,” Eilish would double down as she complimented her love interest’s underwear, before slyly looking to her collaborator: “Charli likes boys, but she knows I’d hit it.” Both “Lunch” and “Guess” became key fixtures in what observers referred to as the sapphic pop renaissance of the summer, where women singing about their love for women took over the cultural conversation. As artists like Chappell Roan and Reneé Rapp dominated the festival circuit, Eilish’s odes to flirtation and feasting flitted around the Hot 100’s top 40. 

Yet the great benefit of Eilish’s release strategy had yet to fully pay off. As “Lunch” and most of the rest of Hit Me’s songs moved down the charts in the weeks following their release, one song began to slowly glide up the charts. It wasn’t ambient, slap-bass featuring “Chihiro,” the song Eilish had filmed a music video for and signaled as her followup single — rather, the lovestruck, ‘80s-tinged “Birds of a Feather” emerged from the nest, gradually soaring up the Hot 100. 

“Birds,” by almost every measure, is unlike other Billie Eilish songs. Over plinking synths and low-key acoustic guitar strums, a smitten Eilish sings about an uncomplicated, eternal kind of love — the kind of love that, in so many of her other songs, had notably eluded her. Gone are the sneaky, off-kilter production tricks from breakout When We All Fall Asleep, now replaced by a simple melody. Even Billie’s vocals evolve throughout the song; her signature airy head-voice shifts down into a stunning, full-throated belt by the song’s conclusion. 

Perhaps that’s why fans became so enamored with the track. The song quickly found an audience on TikTok, soundtracking thousands of videos celebrating users’ friendships and relationships, as Eilish’s voice promised that she couldn’t “change the weather,” but that “if it’s forever, it’s even better.” Even though the track wasn’t necessarily intended to be a single, the fans had spoken: by July, the label had officially serviced the the track to radio as the album’s second official single. “Birds” quickly rose to No. 1 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in August, where it’s ruled for a combined 18 weeks and counting. After giving a beachside performance of the song for the Olympic handover celebration in August, the song continued climbing up the Pop Airplay chart until it reached No. 1 in September, where it earned an eight-week stay at the summit. After the release of the track’s paranormal video at the end of September, “Birds” reached No. 2 on the Hot 100, become one of Eilish’s career-defining hits. 

It’s fitting that Eilish earned her latest breakout track without meaning to – that seemed to be her standard mode of operations over the last year. The singer had insisted since her breakthrough that she had zero interest in being a role model for her fans — after all, she was still figuring out how to live her life, how could she be expected to show others how to live theirs? Even this year, she continued to point out that she will not be the new poster child for mental health issues or queer identity (both more than fair decisions on her part, considering both issues are intrinsic to her private life). 

But Eilish did spend much of 2024 making good use of her platform to try and leave the world a better place than she found it. Where the music industry has been found to be extremely lacking on environmental issues, Eilish spoke up about how she and her team placed sustainability at the forefront of her career. The singer called out the industry standard of releasing multiple vinyl variants to drive sales as “so wasteful,” especially with the lack of using recycled materials when it comes to vinyl. When the 2024 presidential election rolled around, Eilish threw her weight behind Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, praising her advocacy not only for the environment, but for women’s issues, LGBTQ+ rights and more. 

Even as December rolls around, Eilish is still reaping the rewards of her big year. A July performance of her song “Wildflower” sprouted up all over TikTok, sending the song back into the top 40 before falling off for the holiday season. The album — which remains in the Billboard 200’s top 10 six months after its release — also earned Eilish a massive 7 Grammy nominations for 2025, including album of the year.

Yet for all of her massive career wins in 2024, it’s her personal journey to self-discovery this year that might best reflect Eilish’s place in our current pop culture discourse. For the first time since she blasted into the public eye as the chaotic, feisty, goth girl next door, the singer-songwriter seems to have found the lane that she is most comfortable in — one where she’s not limited by the perceptions put upon her by anyone other than herself. In the choose-your-own-adventure book that is the modern music industry, Billie Eilish finally seems to have found a storyline of pop stardom that she can work best with; it just so happens that she wrote this one herself. 

Check back tomorrow for our Nos. 8 and 7 Greatest Pop Stars, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!