Greatest Pop Stars by Year

11/27/2024

Our new GPS21C episode covers an artist who has done things in pop music that we have never seen or heard before.

11/27/2024

With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard has spent the last few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. You can see the stars who have made our list so far here — and now, we examine the century in Taylor Swift, who took pop stardom to places we hadn’t previously thought possible. (Hear more discussion of Taylor Swift and explanation of her list ranking on our Greatest Pop Stars podcast — with her episode debuting Wednesday — and see our recently rebuilt list of the Greatest Pop Star by Year from 1981 to 2023 here.)

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It’s amusing to think back on Taylor Swift at age 17, staring straight into Tim McGraw’s soul at the 2007 ACM Awards while performing her debut single – which just so happened to be named after him. 

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Pitchy but spirited, plucky but deeply promising as a songwriter, it was clear that she was bursting at the seams with talent and ambition – fully capable, in theory, of reaching the greatest heights a career in the music business could offer. But the audacity she demonstrated by taking the moniker of one of country’s biggest stars, claiming it for her own release – her first-ever, at that – and serenading him with it in front of all of their peers on live television? That proved she also had the sheer nerve she’d need to actually get there.  

Time and time again, that same moxie would propel the Pennsylvania native to previously inconceivable heights, her profile skyrocketing with each album as she stacked up chart records, historic sales numbers and unprecedented Recording Academy recognition. Through honoring all the traits that made her different – her sharp pen, her relatable girl-next-door awkwardness, her hopeless romanticism – and rejecting culture’s previous expectations for female artists to be overtly sexy, pliable and cool, she was able to forcefully, gravitationally bend culture to her will and become one of the world’s biggest undisputed pop stars, despite her eight-year late start in country music.  

She is the only person to ever win album of the year at the Grammys four times. She has the second-most Billboard Hot 100 entries of all time (only Drake has more) and ties with Jay-Z for second-most No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 (bested only by The Beatles). She is one of the most impressive touring artists of the past quarter-century, a status that has culminated with her global Eras Tour becoming the highest-grossing trek of all time in 2023, just halfway through its run, as it repeatedly set stadium attendance records and boosted local economies in its confetti-and-friendship-bracelet-strewn wake. She’s a billionaire, the only female artist to become one predominantly through music alone. She is the most famous woman in the world.  

And, with all due respect to Tim McGraw, the first thing millions of young pop fans really do think of when they hear his name is Taylor Swift.  

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Swift and her fans were both young when they first saw each other, she an angel-faced teenager with corkscrew curls and lofty dreams that spilled over into both songs and MySpace posts, they a pack of mostly adolescent girls who pored over her interviews, replayed her vlogs long before “vlogging” was even a thing and started picking up guitars at higher rates to emulate their beloved heroine. The details of her origin story are now common bits of trivia — she was born Dec. 13, 1989 to Scott and Andrea Swift, raised on a Christmas tree farm in Wyomissing, and did you know her lucky number is 13? — but they used to make up the sacred web of knowledge held dear by her earliest admirers. To them, the tale of what happened next is also etched into memory like a bible passage: She moved to Nashville as a teenager to pursue a country music career, scored a publishing deal while still a student at Hendersonville High School and later got her big break when Scott Borchetta discovered her at the Bluebird Café and signed her to his infant label Big Machine Records.  

In 2006, she dropped her self-titled debut LP through Big Machine and promoted it heavily, embarking on radio tours and hand-packing her own CDs into envelopes to personally send off to stations. She performed constantly — later joining Rascal Flatts, George Strait, Brad Paisley, Faith Hill and, yes, Tim McGraw as an opener on their respective country tours – and she was already demonstrating an instinctual business savvy that’s uncommon in most creatives, let alone ones who are still just 16. As an incentive for fans to buy copies of the record, for instance, she started planting hidden messages in her CD lyric booklets hinting at the real-life inspirations behind her songs, a tradition that would continue on future albums and grow more tantalizing as her subjects became more famous.  

The specifics of this era feel fuzzier now that Swift has been ubiquitous for years — especially when, in 2024, modern stars find fame seemingly overnight through the lightning strike of social media virality as opposed to slowly, steadily building their fanbases over time. But her early career was much more of an old-school, brick-by-brick climb up the ranks than we often give her credit for now, fueled by the fact that on Taylor Swift, she was already composing with the skill of an experienced career songwriter who had a particular knack for connecting with young girls – because, well, she still was one herself. 

Lead single “Tim McGraw” became Swift’s first entry on the Hot 100 that September, and the following year, the heart-rending “Teardrops on My Guitar” and the maniacally catchy “Our Song” also made their way up the chart. Neither of those would reach their peaks until 2008, though, when fiery breakup bangers “Should’ve Said No” and “Picture to Burn” also entered and became top 40 hits, just in time to capture everyone’s attentions ahead of the release of Fearless in November. She was a darling in the insular world of country music, earning professional recognition from the CMAs and ACMs, but she was becoming a face people recognized in pop culture, too. It was around this time that she was embraced into Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez’s Disney star ranks and briefly dated Joe Jonas, her first of several tabloid-feeding romances that would become central to the way we think and talk about her persona. People were looking – she just needed to stick the landing with her next album.  

Again, the magnitude of the entire Fearless era is hard to conceptualize now that Swift has dwarfed herself so many times over the years. But in late 2008, the musician officially exploded into crossover-star status thanks to the staggering success of her sophomore album – which spent an incredible 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and sold 592,000 million copies in its first week. She dominated radio with country-pop smashes that remain classics in her discography to this day – most notably, “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me,” two top five Hot 100 hits with cinematic music videos that inspired some of the most memorable moments in her iconography — and she became the ultimate it-girl, whose face you craned your neck to see on red carpets, talk shows, magazine covers. The very first headlining trek she ever embarked on, the Fearless Tour, was through arenas, and she capped the triumphant era with a headline-grabbing album of the year win at the 2010 Grammys, at that point the youngest artist to ever do so. 

The most talked-about moment from the first of Swift’s many imperial phases, though, was none of the above — but you probably already know where this is going. Like Shakespearean foils crossing paths for the first time, Kanye West fatefully thrust himself into the then-19-year-old Swift’s storyline, publicly declaring at the 2009 VMAs that she actually didn’t deserve one of the countless awards she would take home that year and leaving her shellshocked on stage in a moment that would catapult her into the international news cycle for weeks to come. Everyone from Dr. Phil to President Barack Obama had an opinion on the matter, with the latter famously declaring the rapper to be “a jacka–.” 

Now, to look at the trajectory Swift was already on up until this point and still argue that the VMAs incident “made [her] famous,” as Ye would later claim, is laughable. But his protests at the show would foreshadow so many others coming for her down the line – namely, questions about her overall worthiness as an awards powerhouse, as debates raged over whether such a young (and female) performer was actually writing her own songs, or merely coasting off the contributions of her older male collaborators. 

In response to those criticisms, she would pen the entirety of her 2010 follow-up album, Speak Now, without any outside lyrical help, resulting in a magical 14-track romantic dreamscape that remains a fervent fan-favorite to this day. If Fearless showcased her ability to craft hooky, accessible earworms, her third studio effort introduced her gift for penning deeply personal, woundingly emotional ballads like “Back to December,” “Dear John” and “Last Kiss,” a trade most important to the DNA of Swift’s musical genius. 

Though it spent six weeks at No. 1 and helped make Swift Billboard’s then-youngest Woman of the Year, Speak Now didn’t spawn the same level of pop smashes, critical acclaim or Grammy love as its older sister did. When she made 2012’s Red, she seemed determined to make up for its lack of universality, enlisting the help of pop-music godfathers Max Martin and Shellback to push her sound up to the absolute barrier of pop, while staying just country enough to hold onto her identity and keep Big Machine happy. It worked: the deliberately cloying “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” became her first-ever No. 1 hit on the Hot 100, and with numerous top 40 smashes (“I Knew You Were Trouble,” “22” and “Begin Again,” to name a few), the project had double the capacity for hits as Fearless. Slower, more intimate tracks like “The Last Time,” “I Almost Do” and crown jewel “All Too Well” also expanded on the confessional sad-girl oeuvre she’d started with Speak Now, making Red a beautiful hodgepodge of all the best parts of both albums that crystallized what we now recognize as Swift’s greatest contributions to modern music: catchy hooks and heartbreaking ballads. 

When Red also failed to take home album of the year at the Grammys, and her self-described “break my heart and I’ll write a song about you” schtick started to be met with antagonism – as Swift later explained, she became a “national lightning rod for slut-shaming” — she once again sought to level up. Breaking almost entirely away from her longtime Nashville collaborators and assembling a top 40 dream team comprised of Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder and newbie producer Jack Antonoff, the increasingly self-assured artist narrowed her focus on making an unabashed pop album that exploded with energy and shimmering ‘80s synths. She chose singles centered less on boys and more around moving to New York (which she did around that time), feuding with a frenemy (ahem, Katy Perry) and shaking off the haters. It was a colossal success by every metric. Thus began imperial phase no. 2: 1989.  

Swift was downright inescapable at this point, with 1989 selling 1.29 million copies in its first week and reigning atop the Billboard 200 for 11 weeks. Her dominion was powered by an impeccable single and music video run, with “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood” all spending time at No. 1 while “Out of the Woods,” “Style” and “Wildest Dreams” held down her rule over radio and department-store speakers for years after the fact. She embarked on her first-ever stadium tour, on which she often brough out guest artists and random famous friends from her #Squad – the innerworkings of which were constantly being dissected by fans and gossip sites alike, both boosting Swift’s fame and narrowing the microscope on her body, style, decisions and personal life. She became Billboard’s first-ever two-time Woman of the Year while making history as the youngest musician to ever take home album of the year at the Grammys twice.  

She was Caesar, finally ascending the throne, her ambition and tunnel vision at last giving way to more success than even she could’ve dreamed of. But she hadn’t gotten there with the amount of support and trust she’d hoped from her advisers at Big Machine, who she has insinuated dragged their feet on every step of her country departure. Meanwhile, someone else was preparing to reenter the picture, a sharp knife strapped to his Yeezys. 

When public opinion tilted in Ye’s favor following the Great Phone Call Dispute of 2016, Swift responded to the chorus of voices undermining her — fellow celebrities and people behind the scenes included — by hiding away. After a year of self-imposed solitude in London, during which time she fell in love with actor Joe Alwyn, the singer re-emerged in November 2017 with Reputation, one of her most pointed creative risks to date. The dark, theatrical LP found Swift truly reclaiming her narrative and explaining her side of a controversy in detail for the first time in her career, a sharp swerve from her previous method of staying quiet and letting the public decide what she was thinking for her. She would never again be the girl in the silver gown, stunned into silence on the VMAs stage. 

Taylor Swift

As soon as her six-album contract was up with Reputation, Swift split from Big Machine and signed with Republic, at the time only hinting at the reason behind her decision: “Incredibly exciting to know that I’ll own all of my master recordings that I make from now on,” she wrote on Instagram. But the signs that she’d been quietly battling her own label for years were there; with 1989, she was open about how hard she’d had to fight Borchetta to let her release a pop album, and on the Reputation Tour, a dedication to Loie Fuller, who “fought for artists to own their own work,” was shown onscreen each night. 

By the time the situation exploded with the sale of Big Machine — and with it, her master recordings — to Scooter Braun in 2019, Swift had already turned in Lover. As we’d learn later in her 2020 Netflix film Miss Americana, she felt that, at 29, this project was her last chance to reach audiences on a global scale before she aged out of pop stardom. This fear seemed to lead to her releasing “Me!” — a slightly juvenile and generic pop track that documentary footage would later show she wrote not with the ambition of living up to her own pop genius, but with the quaint goal of little kids singing along — instead of the LP’s clear pop banger, future four-week No. 1 “Cruel Summer,” as its lead single. The most important part of the Lover era to Swift’s overall legacy is that she finally started using her immeasurable influence for political causes after a decade of silence, championing the LGBTQ community through “You Need to Calm Down” and endorsing Tennessee Democrat Phil Bredesen for U.S. senate over Republican opponent Marsha Blackburn. 

But when Scootergate happened, a fire was lit under her. She issued scathing response after scathing response, making her fury abundantly clear and quickly publicizing her intention to re-record her first six albums in order to reclaim ownership of her past works. While waiting for the clock to run out on the legal barriers blocking her from doing so before November 2020 – and after the COVID-19 pandemic sidelined her plans for the continuation of the Lover era, including a limited run of performances dubbed “Lover Fest” – she surprise-dropped Folklore and Evermore. Un-muddled by months of pre-release rollout or the need for flashy singles or visual moments, the back-to-back albums reminded the general public that her true gift lies in her storytelling — and thanks in part to an understated acoustic-folk sound assisted by The National’s Aaron Dessner, they made Swift “cool” to an entire audience that had never seen her that way before. In 2021, Folklore gave her a record-tying third AOTY win at the Grammys. 

The first piece of imperial phase no. 3 fell into place that April. With the unveiling of her Fearless (Taylor’s Version) re-recording, Swift took her first steps on an escalator that, at the close of the quarter-century, is still going up, sharing a near-exact replica of the album that made her a household name with the additions of never-released songs she wrote and recorded more than 15 years prior. Following that same formula each time, the re-records have only ramped up in cultural significance as they’ve progressed; Red (Taylor’s Version) spawned history’s longest song to go No. 1 with fans’ beloved “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”; Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) outsold its predecessor by 138k units in its first week; and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) became the first re-record to outsell its original counterpart, blowing the already staggering first-week numbers of 2014’s 1989 out of the water with 1.36 million. 

The beauty of the re-recordings was that they both allowed longtime fans to relive some of their best memories with Swift while giving newer fans – or simply outsiders who weren’t paying much attention the first time these albums rolled around – a second chance at experiencing her most quintessential eras in real time. But arguably the most shocking part of the process was the fact that, in between the Taylor’s Versions, she was still recording original music. She dropped Midnights in 2022, moving a jaw-dropping 1.58 million first-week units and spawning her longest-running No. 1 hit with “Anti-Hero” — the most honest she’s ever been in her music about her personal demons and incomprehensible station in life — while making chart history, as the first artist to ever simultaneously occupy the entire top 10 of the Hot 100, not to mention winning a record-setting fourth AOTY Grammy.  

By the time she embarked on her global Eras Tour, interest in her body of work — old songs and brand new — had never been higher, and like the mirror ball she is, Swift has rewarded fans for it every night on the road with more than three hours’ worth of over-the-top scream-your-face-off catharsis, each show an homage to the painstaking career she’s built, brick by brick, one beautiful, messy era at a time. The unprecedented scale of the tour aligns with the absolutely unfathomable reach she’s achieved in 2023 and onward, her victory lap only continuing with the introductions of boyfriend Travis Kelce to the fairytale – through which she’s also captivated the NFL, proving that no major institution is off limits for her to take over — and the release of 12-week Billboard 200-topper The Tortured Poets Department. The dense 31-track blockbuster LP is second only to Adele’s 25 in highest first-week sales of all time (2.6 million) and has once again swept nominations in every major Grammy category for Swift in 2025, including what could be a record-extending album of the year.  

Last year, she was Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2023, making her the only artist to ever win the title in three separate years (following 2015 and 2021), but the run she’s had in the past biennium isn’t just the grandest of her own career; it’s also possibly the most extraordinary cultural supremacy any of us have ever seen one artist accomplish in our lives. Her decisions, whereabouts and opinions are all considered public domain – you’re out of the loop if you haven’t seen what she wore to the latest Kansas City Chiefs game – and there is no reason to believe that if she dropped another album tomorrow, it wouldn’t invariably end up spending more weeks at No. 1 on the charts than even Tortured Poets, because when hasn’t she been able to top herself? Nothing is out of the realm of possibility for her.  

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All of this to say, the star is still outdoing herself, still beating her own unbeatable feats, still forging ahead in the same uncharted direction when most others would’ve long since burned out or jumped ship to alternative career paths – all of which, it shouldn’t go without saying, is exceedingly rare for someone nearly 20 long years into their career. She is venerated by the greats who came before her, from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — who declared that Swift’s mega-popularity is the closest phenomenon to Beatlemania he’s ever seen – to Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton and Carole King. At just 34 years old, her catalog has inspired college courses all over the world that treat her written word with the same level of analysis as Wordsworth, and her business innovations – be it the album variations she’s been experimenting with since 1989’s collectible Polaroid sets, her negotiations with Spotify and Apple Music for fairer streaming rates or the playbook she’s still writing on how to re-release old music to new blockbuster returns – will continue to have reverberations throughout the industry, for longer than we can probably even currently imagine. 

For all these reasons and so many more, she is Billboard’s No. 2 Greatest Pop Star of the 21st century, blowing past countless other accomplished hitmakers and icons. The fact that controversy will likely tear through the internet over her being just one small space below No. 1 is just another testament to her power, but regardless, her placement shouldn’t leave Swifties upset for too long — especially considering how much later in the millennium she got her start, both in the genre and music in general. In a way, Swift has always been like pop’s most curious tourist, never quite feeling like she’d always belonged there, more so trying on the things she liked best about the territory and sticking to her own guns for the rest. Instead of coming up and thriving naturally within the bounds of what we understand pop to be then and now, she rewrote the genre in her own image and, in doing so, charted a new course for crossover success that countless other confessional singer-songwriters like Olivia Rodrigo, Phoebe Bridgers, Gracie Abrams have since benefitted from. 

That’s a lot more than tween Taylor bargained for when she wrote on her first album that she was “just a girl, trying to find a place in this world.” And if what her history has told us remains true, she’s still just getting started. 

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — find our accompanying podcast deep dives and ranking explanations here — and be sure to check back next Tuesday (Dec. 3) as we unveil our No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of the Century so far!

THE LIST SO FAR:

Honorable Mentions

25. Katy Perry24. Ed Sheeran23. Bad Bunny22. One Direction21. Lil Wayne20. Bruno Mars19. BTS18. The Weeknd17. Shakira16. Jay-Z15. Miley Cyrus14. Justin Timberlake13. Nicki Minaj12. Eminem11. Usher10. Adele9. Ariana Grande8. Justin Bieber7. Kanye West6. Britney Spears5. Lady Gaga4. Drake3. Rihanna2. Taylor Swift

(This list is a project that Billboard initially published in 2018, and which we’ve updated in some form every year since. In honor of our associated Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century list finally nearing its conclusion — we’re publishing our No. 2 essay today (Nov. 26), with No. 1 coming next Tuesday (Dec. 3) — we’re republishing the project, now updated until 2023, and in a more easily navigated form. Check it out here and come back next week for both the reveal of our No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of the 21st Century, and then the week after as we begin rolling out our picks for the Greatest Pop Star of 2024!)

Pop stardom is, in many ways, a competitive sport. Not one that demands a lone winner as justification for the whole enterprise, exactly, but one that still entrances those of us watching from the sidelines to see who’ll come out on top. Who’s No. 1 this week? Who outsold who? Who’s playing the biggest venues? Who’s racking up Grammys, BBMAs, VMAs? Listeners can love and admire their artists of choice without them winning these many mini-battles — but when they do, it provides the same rush as a home-team victory, since it still provides some measure of that most important validation in fandom: Our fav is better than your fav. 

Now, we here at Billboard obviously play no small part in the declaration of these victors, as success on our charts has long been one of the biggest measures by which pop stardom is sized and graded. But we also know that while chart success is an essential factor, pop stardom carries too many intangibles to be judged solely on any combination of numerical calculations. It’s not just hit singles and best-selling albums: It’s music videos, it’s live performances, it’s image, it’s headlines and controversy and cultural impact and overall ubiquity. It’s the answer to the question, “Could you have lived through this year without having an opinion on this artist?”

Of course, it’s a far more subjective assessment than simply which team scored more points by the final buzzer. But it’s a discussion that has long been ongoing for rappers, and now something our staffers and most trusted contributors have been working on for many months to bring it to the pop world — with our list of the greatest pop stars from each year since 1981. 

Now, understand that when we say “pop star,” we’re not just meaning solo artists in the classic triple-threat, top 40 dead-center mold of Madonna and Michael Jackson. Those two artists appear, of course, as do many of their most obvious acolytes. But we define “pop star” broadly enough for it to also encompass rappers and singer-songwriters, rock bands and R&B groups. As long as they were impactful and wide-reaching enough to have a profound impact on that vague concept we know as the mainstream — and even more amorphously, the culture — they’re up for consideration here. 

Why 1981 as a starting point? Well, gotta start somewhere, and ‘81 was the year that forever changed modern stardom, with the premiere of MTV cementing the music video as an elemental factor in pop iconicity. Though its true impact on the top 40 landscape wouldn’t really be felt for a couple years after its debut, videos forever changed the scale of pop stardom, making the biggest artists three-dimensional figures, as present in our lives as our favorite sitcom stars and talk show hosts, if not more so. The new competitive landscape of MTV rotation forced them to think bigger, to try harder — and from Janet to Alanis to Rihanna to Drake, it’s impossible to envision the past 40-plus years of pop stardom without its impact. 

And what does “greatest” mean, exactly? Well, it’s not exactly “most popular,” though that’s certainly a large part of it. And it’s definitely not our personal favorites, strictly speaking — we love these artists, but this wasn’t the place for any of us to stump for our Should Be Bigger pet causes. Mostly, we’re looking for the pop star that best defines each year; the one whose impact was most deeply felt across the most spaces. How much of the year the artist is active for also matters: For instance, Taylor Swift might have released 1989 in 2014, but the album didn’t drop until October — so she’s more likely to be in play for 2015, when the set spun off most of its hit singles and videos and she spent most of the year on her victory lap world tour. 

Of course, our perception of pop stardom is unavoidably colored by personal experience — and our decidedly North American perspective — and you might very well see some of our picks and think that based on your own memories, we couldn’t be more wrong. Totally fair: We’ve done the best we could with the objective stats and the emotional reactions we all have, but several of these come down to coin-flip situations where we had to just sigh and go with our gut. To acknowledge some of the artists we passed over, though, we’ve also included some honorable mentions for each year — along with awarding rookie of the year (for emerging pop stars then still new to the mainstream) and comeback of the year (for veteran stars who had their first big year in a while) distinctions for each year. 

Read on below to find our essays attempting to justify our picks for each year — along with a handful of sidebar discussions that we couldn’t get to in our primary pieces — and feel free to let us know how we did your favorite artist wrong. Do try to remember, though: In pop music as in sports, there’s always next year. 

1981: Blondie

Image Credit: Illustration by Heston Godby; Getty Images

(In 2020, the Billboard staff updated our originally 2018-released list project, which selected a Greatest Pop Star of every year going back to 1981. Read our entry below on why BTS was our Greatest Pop Star of 2020 — with our ’20 Honorable Mention runner-ups, Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year pop stars at the bottom — and find the rest of our picks for every year up to present day here.)

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Americans have a checkered history of dismissing things they don’t understand — the metric system, universal healthcare, and of course, K- pop. Until the last few years, the colorful world of Korean pop was a genre that was on the periphery of the American pop mainstream, marked by viral-hit outliers like PSY’s “Gangnam Style” and groups like 2NE1 and Girls’ Generation gracing the lower reaches of the Billboard charts. But after half a decade of internationally successful tours, three No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, and a steadily amassed fan ARMY that includes followers from all over the world, RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook — better known as the world-conquering boy band BTS — heralded the genre’s true U.S. breakthrough, and became the greatest pop stars of 2020.

In February 2020, the septet released their fourth studio album Map of the Soul: 7, led by the electrifying “On.” The album earned the group their fourth No. 1 on the Billboard 200, with critics noting their musical diversity and maturity as songwriters. Despite such acclaim and a strong chart debut, the group remained largely off the U.S. radio airwaves. In a push to win over stateside listeners, the track was accompanied by three stunning visuals, a remixed rendition featuring English-language pop star Sia, and a tour of the hottest tickets on late night TV. “On” became BTS’ first entry to land in the top five on the Hot 100, debuting at No. 4. With the group’s international stadium tour slated to kick off in April, things were revving up for BTS to officially take over the U.S. market.

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But by March, the COVID-19 pandemic had dashed the live hopes for BTS and every other touring artist. While many acts scrambled to pivot, every move of the group’s in the consequent months was made with precision — securing both financial and cultural gains in the U.S., South Korea, and the rest of the world. With the support of its dedicated fan base, BTS instead dominated in the livestream and virtual space, holding June’s widely successful Bang Bang Con virtual concert (which drew in $19 million) and making a heartfelt commencement speech (delivered in both English and Korean) at Youtube’s Dear Class of 2020, a virtual event for students graduating in the time of COVID. While A-list stars tend to be selective with their appearances, BTS doubled down on performances, as they made rounds at the Billboard Music Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, and even a more intimate set at NPR’s Tiny Desk — ultimately maintaining the members’ visibility and social media presence all throughout the year.

Beyond the numbers, the group also translated the social consciousness of its music into action by responding to the racial reckoning in America. In June, following the national protests over George Floyd’s killing, BTS donated $1 million to the Black Lives Matter movement. When asked about this decision, Jin recalled how “when we’re abroad or in other situations, we’ve also been subjected to prejudice.” (BTS’ rise in US popularity has also persisted despite the alarming rise in discrimination and hate crimes against Asian-Americans in 2020, likely stemming from the rhetoric surrounding COVID-19.)

When August rolled around, the eight memembers still had a few tricks up their pastel-colored sleeves. Even with their growing list of achievements, BTS remained absent from American pop radio until they released their first ever English-language single, the explosive megapop track “Dynamite.” Dropping the single became the group’s crowning moment in mainstream U.S. music, making its way to radio stations, awards shows, TikTok trends, and the top spot on the Hot 100. The track even grabbed the attention of the Recording Academy, with a Grammy nomination for best pop duo/group performance — the first-ever Grammy nomination for a K-pop artist, a feat long coveted by the band. By October, BTS’ label Big Hit Entertainment had positioned itself to go public on the Korea Exchange. The label raised the equivalent of $840 million in its initial public offering (IPO) — making Big Hit founder/co-CEO Bang Si-hyuk a billionaire.

On the heels of the group’s first No. 1, BTS notched two more buzzer-beating Hot 100-toppers to round out the year. In October BTS racked up a second No. 1 with an appearance on the remix to Jawsh 685 and Jason Derulo’s “Savage Love,” helping the song catapult from No. 8 to the top spot following the new version’s first week of release. Then, to cap the group’s historic 2020, BTS dropped fifth studio album Be in November, along with its melancholy, quarantine-appropriate single “Life Goes On.” Both album and single simultaneously debuted at No. 1, on the Billboard 200 and Hot 100, respectively. Impressively, “Life Goes On” became the first primarily Korean No. 1 in the latter chart’s 62-year history (beating the previous No. 2 peak of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” in 2012).

It’s impossible to ignore that BTS is the first Asian artist to appear on this list, alongside undeniable, no-questions-asked English-language superstars. While non-English works of art are often sidelined into “foreign” categories, this level of recognition for a predominantly Korean-language band from Western media — the group was even named 2020 Entertainer of the Year by TIME — feels like a changing of the guard at the gates of American top 40. With each milestone and new No. 1 in 2020, BTS made it harder for U.S. audiences to deny not only the group’s own supreme superstardom, but also K-pop’s much-deserved place in mainstream music. And now that we’re finally listening, it pains us to imagine all the potential pop classics we missed out on simply because of the language barrier between us.

Honorable Mention: The Weeknd (After Hours, “Blinding Lights,” “In Your Eyes”), Dua Lipa (Future Nostalgia, “Don’t Start Now,” “Break My Heart”), Taylor Swift (Folklore, Evermore, Miss Americana documentary) 

Rookie of the Year: Roddy Ricch

“Stream yummy by justin bieber.” That message, along with a flex emoji, was Compton, CA rapper Roddy Ricch’s tweeted response to the Belieber fan movement — also promoted by Bieber himself — to get the pop superstar’s new single to No. 1 on the Hot 100. But Ricch knew that the song then occupying the top spot, his own cinematic blockbuster “The Box,” was likely unmovable; indeed, the captivating, flow-shifting breakthrough smash would end up spending 11 straight weeks atop the chart. He’d add on another seven weeks to that tally in the summer with his guest spot on DaBaby’s “Rockstar,” and spent three additional weeks atop the Billboard 200 with his action-packed debut LP Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial after it debuted at No. 1 at the end of 2019, proving his solo star power. His response when Selena Gomez’s fans tried to mount a challenge to it for one of those weeks? “Stream rare by selena gomez.” 

Comeback of the Year: The Black Eyed Peas

“I want to make fantasy, feel-good, people-travel-the-world music,” Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am told Billboard of his ambitions in June 2020 — a time when not a lot of people were traveling the world or feeling good. Still, fantasy has always been a specialty of the pop-rap group, whose commercial peak came with a series of celebratory party jams released in the wake of the ‘08 financial crisis. The world was once again ready for will & co. in 2020, when the reunited group’s globetrotting took them to the world of Latin pop and reggaetón, resulting in their first visits to the Hot 100 since 2011, via collabs with international stars J Balvin (“Ritmo (Bad Boys For Life)”) and Ozuna (“Mamacita”). The group’s comeback year was capped by a closing set at the MTV Video Music Awards, ending with them playing signature smash “I Gotta Feeling” while a gigantic UFO appeared from above to beam them up; for 2020, it felt about right. 

(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 2021 here, or head back to the full list here.)

(In 2018, the Billboard staff released a list project of its choices for the Greatest Pop Star of every year, going back to 1981. Read our entry below on why Ed Sheeran was our Greatest Pop Star of 2018 — with our ’18 Honorable Mention runner-ups, Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year pop stars at the bottom — and find the rest of our picks for every year up to present day here.)

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Drake’s generational popularity by the time of 2018 could only be truly grasped through a deep understanding of late-’10s trends, of collapsing genre borders and changing gatekeepers, of social media-driven virality and narrative-building, and of general Millennial anxieties and aspirations. But in a sense, all you need is one number: 29. 

That’s how many weeks Drake spent at No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 2018 — not even counting his crucial uncredited appearance on Travis Scott’s chart-topping “Sicko Mode” — the most for a single year in the chart’s 60-plus history. When you can claim majority ownership of the Hot 100 for a calendar year, chances are you’re just the guy for that year. 

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It was the culmination of a decade in the spotlight for the teen actor turned hip-hop superstar. With the blessing and early guidance of Young Money label paterfamilias/21st-century icon Lil Wayne, Drake broke out at the end of the ‘00s with a blend of puffed-chest hashtag rhyming and melancholy, melodic introspection, often singing and rapping on the same song. His hooks, verses and business sense only sharpened into the thick of the 2010s, and by 2013 he could credibly claim to be “just as famous as my mentor.” In 2016, he was unmistakably the biggest rapper in the world, with both an album (Views) and lead single (“One Dance”) topping the Billboard charts for double-digit weeks — even though the muted critical and fan reception to each seemed to leave the rapper vulnerable to claims about his slide being imminent.

Indeed, what made Drake’s unprecedented level of chart prosperity in 2018 so fascinating is that it happened while, on a slightly more below-the-surface level, his career was thoroughly under siege. A long-simmering feud with veteran street rapper Pusha T and his superstar producer Kanye West reached a breaking point with an escalating trio of volleys between the two rappers — Pusha’s “Infrared,” Drake’s “Duppy Freestyle” and then Pusha’s “The Story of Adidon.” The last one landed the heaviest blows, most notably unearthing (via its single art) an early photo that the mixed-race Drake had taken in Blackface, and revealing that the rapper had fathered the titular child the year before, whose presence he’d not yet announced to the world. 

The threat to Drake’s credibility felt real, as it had three years earlier, when collaborator Meek Mill — like Pusha, a respected rapper whose hard-luck hustle and come-up fit the classic hip-hop narrative a lot more neatly than the Canadian-bred, Degrassi-starring Drake — declared war via ghostwriting accusations. But in 2015, Drake triumphed with volume (in both senses), as he dropped two diss tracks aimed at Meek before he could respond with one, then loudly proclaimed victory at his OVO fest while his rival was still trying to figure out what had even happened.

By 2018, Drake was well-positioned enough in the pop mainstream to just let his stats do the talking. He refrained from directly responding to “Adidon,” and trusted that his commercial momentum was overwhelming enough to weather any blows to his image and rep. He had reason for confidence: “God’s Plan,” released that January, had already reigned for 11 weeks on the Hot 100 with no chorus or major musical hook, while follow-up “Nice For What” — which had both, plus a star-studded female takeover video — followed it for seven non-consecutive weeks immediately after. (Even third single “I’m Upset,” which failed to match those commercial heights, provided a valuable diversion when its Degrassi-reuniting video dropped in the weeks following Pusha’s verbal assault.) 

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, Drake’s bet was validated. Fifth studio solo album Scorpion was released in June — a double album, many of whose tracks addressed the Adidon controversy without furthering the tête-à-tête with its progenitor. Those songs still captured headlines and inspired trending topics, but not as many as a new track that had nothing to do with Drake’s son at all: “In My Feelings,” a New Orleans bounce-inspired banger that both sampled and shouted out ascendant Miami duo City Girls, and even invoked Wayne (via his own crossover classic “Lollipop”) as a NoLa patron saint. The dance challenge “Feelings” quickly inspired blew up over social media, the song rocketed to No. 1, and Scorpion made all kinds of chart history while posting the year’s best first-week numbers. By the end of the summer — which “In My Feelings” owned almost exclusively — the Pusha feud was again a footnote. 

The year cemented Drake as finally having reached the same level of commercial invincibility as the giants of the Reagan era. After all, what MTV was to the early ‘80s, social media is to the late ‘10s, and in Drake the moment had officially found its Michael Jackson: one whose videos dominated through memes and gifs rather than TV rotation, one whose albums subsequently racked up historic Spotify play counts instead of unprecedented retail numbers, and one whose dance crazes didn’t even have to be performed by the man himself to become iconic. What’s more, he made it clear to future rap adversaries that he’s now playing by pop rules — and as his 2018 foe should understand better than anyone, he’ll never be taken down as long as he’s still putting numbers on the boards.

Honorable Mention: Ariana Grande (Sweetener, “No Tears Left to Cry,” “Thank U Next”), Cardi B (Invasion of Privacy, “I Like It,” “Finesse (Remix)”), Post Malone (Beerbongs and Bentleys, “Psycho,” “Better Now”)

Rookie of the Year: Dua Lipa

America took its time with Dua Lipa, the Albanian-English pop singer-songwriter who’d already become massive just about everywhere else by the time “New Rules” started to creep its way up the Hot 100 at the end of 2017. It entered the top 10 in early 2018, thanks to its brain-sticking refrain — which took a proactive and highly memeable approach to heartbreak — and viral music video, whose refined choreography and inspired art direction framed Lipa as the star that she really already was. She closed the year as the house diva of choice for Calvin Harris (“One Kiss”) and Diplo/Mark Ronson superduo Silk City (“Electricity”), scoring international hits that made her unavoidable even between album cycles, as true a star sign as any.

Comeback of the Year: Lil Wayne

Really, Lil Wayne deserves the title here for the Carter V announcement video alone: a charming mini-tour through his domicile and house studio, in which he announced with a gleaming-as-ever smile that the long awaited fifth installment in his signature LP series was imminent. The hype was instant, and the album delivered: a 23-track set that delighted fans and even impressed critics, featuring Wayne’s most invigorated rapping in years and some of his most personal bars ever. A decade of label drama and disappointment was seemingly washed away in the record’s first week, where it posted nearly half a million in units moved, littered the Hot 100 with new entries, and proved that Dwayne Carter was still very much Weezy F. Baby, and the “F” ain’t for “finished.” 

(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 2019 here, or head back to the full list here.)