Greatest Pop Stars of 2023

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2023 all this week. At No. 1, we remember the year in Taylor Swift — who, quite simply, spent all year doing things we’ve never seen a pop star do before.
“9/24/23. Taylor was here.” 

So read the bio of the NFL’s official TikTok account on Sept. 24, as Taylor Swift attended her first Kansas City Chiefs home game of the season as the special guest of her then-rumored beau, star tight end Travis Kelce. Swift’s appearance at Arrowhead Stadium was bigger news than anything that happened across 13 football fields that Sunday; even the reported condiments on the chicken she was eating in her guest box spawned year-defining memes. And so, the National Football League – as powerful, influential and deeply embedded a cultural institution as exists in the United States of America – had no choice but to simp for their new pop overlord. Taylor was here. 

Then again, there were very few places Taylor Swift wasn’t in 2023. Certainly not in North America, which she spent most of the year criss-crossing on her culture-consuming Eras Tour, being feted with gifts, welcome videos, keys to the city, street namings, city namings and Taylor Swift Days in jubilant anticipation of her arrival. And if it wasn’t your city she was coming to that weekend, chances are you still had a good idea where she was headed, because fans, the press and just about everyone else was on Taylor Watch all year – the kind of full-time job that major media companies needed to start specifically hiring reporters for. When Swift was in the building this year, nobody else mattered as much; when she wasn’t in the building, her absence was still bigger news than anyone’s actual attendance. 

Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2023:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Peso Pluma | Comeback of the Year: Miley Cyrus | No. 10: Drake | No. 9: Doja Cat | No. 8: Bad Bunny | No. 7: Olivia Rodrigo | No. 6: Karol G | No. 5: Morgan Wallen | No. 4: Ice Spice | No. 3: Beyoncé | No. 2: SZA

A lot of pop stars – some new, some established, some all-timers – had great years in 2023. We here at Billboard just wrote about nine of them, with plenty more we wish we could’ve given the full treatment; it was a notably great year for pop’s best and brightest. And yet, the decision of who would be our No. 1 Greatest Pop Star has never been easier. That’s truly no disrespect to our runners-up; it’s just about Taylor Swift having the kind of year that, as recently as late last year – even as we actually predicted in our No. 3 Greatest Pop Star of 2022 essay for her that she’d be “ready to snatch the crown right back in 2023” – we never could have seen coming. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could have a year this dominant: not this deep into the streaming era, not this long after the oft-proclaimed death of the monoculture, not when the entire industry seems to be in crisis over how to capture and hold onto listener attention. It was a year not to be judged against Swift’s 2023 peers, but against the entirety of modern pop history. 

Which isn’t to say that it came totally out of nowhere, of course. The main reason we were able to call such a big year coming for Swift in 2023 was because she’d already ended 2022 on a stunning new career peak, 15 years into her superstardom. October’s Midnights release had served as the climax-to-that-point of a 2020s where Swift had made every right move, starting with the acclaimed alt-folk reset of Folklore and Evermore in 2020 and crescendoing with the triumphant first two Taylor’s Versions re-recordings (and the improbably Billboard Hot 100-besting 10-minute revision of Red deep cut “All Too Well”) in 2021. We actually named her the Greatest Pop Star of that year, too, saying that she’d been “making the type of moves within and outside of her music that elevate an artist from superstar to legend.” 

But Midnights took her to yet another new level, with 1.57 million units moved in its first week – nearly three years into a decade where no other artist, even Adele, had even come particularly close to clearing a million – and spawning the longest-reigning Hot 100-topper of her career with the four-quadrant smash “Anti-Hero.” Previously, Taylor Swift’s Greatest Pop Star Alive claims had to be tempered with allowances that Adele sold more, that Drake streamed better, that The Weeknd and Ariana Grande had bigger pop hit singles. Now all those qualifiers were moot: Swift was dominating on every platform at every level, and if anyone else was nearing her performance in one or two facets of superstardom, they certainly weren’t in all of ‘em. She ended 2022 the unchallenged No. 1 in the pop arena; the only reason she slotted at No. 3 in our Greatest Pop Star rankings for the year (behind Bad Bunny and Harry Styles) was because she’d spent the first eight months of the calendar mostly dormant, recharging. 

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There would be no such lengthy respites in 2023. Swift kicked off the year still in the golden hour of the Midnights album cycle, with “Anti-Hero” spending the first two-non-holiday chart weeks of the year at No. 1, and second single “Lavender Haze” growing at pop radio. Over the first two months of the year, she released a gently surreal video for “Haze,” picked up a Grammy for best video as director of All Too Well: The Short Film and scored a top five album on the Billboard 200 for a Record Store Day release of her Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions collection. But mostly, she prepped for the Eras Tour. 

It would be no exaggeration to call the Eras Tour the single most anticipated live trek of the century. Part of that was just a numbers game: Taylor Swift had not played a full concert since the Reputation tour in 2018, having to cancel her planned Lover Fest mini-world tour for 2020 – the COVID shutdown year. In the half-decade since that successful live run, Swift had released four entirely new albums, as well as two Taylor’s Version deluxe re-recordings, and myriad in-between bonus goodies. All of that had combined to make Swift significantly more popular than she had been in the late ‘10s, when she was already one of the biggest pop stars and live draws on the planet. Needless to say, the fans were ready – so much so that Ticketmaster’s servers had proven woefully under-equipped to handle the level of demand once Eras Tour tickets were first released to the public the prior November. 

And when Eras finally kicked off on March 17, it was far more than just the tens of thousands of fans in attendance at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, AZ who were watching. Interest in the tour was so high that phone-filmed bits of the show spread through social media like wildfire, with some fans even live-streaming the entire experience from their phones. Consequently, even though no official stream of the kickoff concert was offered, millions of Swifties still saw the whole thing, if only in minute-long clips at a time. Eras was in many ways the first event tour for the TikTok Generation – the app rising to global prominence during Taylor’s touring hiatus – and footage of and reactions to the first concert soon overwhelmed the service, ultimately reaching all corners of the internet as fans pored over each song selection, each costume and set change, each little bit of in-between banter. 

The kickoff show was, in every way, just the beginning for the Eras Tour. Contrary to 99% of big pop tours, national interest in Eras hardly dropped at all after the first night, as the set’s rotating spot of two acoustically performed “surprise songs” gave fans reason to excitedly tune into the social chatter (and videos) from each new concert. “I AM DONE WITH TAYLOR SWIFT” became a recurring trending topic as the battle cry of faux-betrayed Swifties, irate that their personal fav track appeared in the setlist for a show when they weren’t in attendance. The celebrity turnout at Eras gigs also became a reliable topic of content and discussion, with everyone from Julia Roberts to Flavor Flav getting in on the world’s hottest ticket. 

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One celebrity who actually took the Eras stage with Swift was rising rapper and pop star Ice Spice, who joined Swift at MetLife Stadium in late May to perform their new remix to the set-closing Midnights cut “Karma,” which had been released earlier that day. The remix drew a mixed reception, as the two artists’ styles meshed a little awkwardly, but the alliance was still a logical one for Swift, as Ice Spice covered the one area inside the mainstream that she was no longer really able to touch – the cutting edge – and also just lent a much-needed freshness to the no-longer-new Midnights single, helping “Karma” to surge to No. 2 on the Hot 100.

Of course, fans theorized about another reason why the pairing was a shrewd one for Swift, and it had to do with Matty Healy, frontman for veteran U.K. alt-pop fixtures The 1975. Healy and Swift had a friendship dating back to the mid-’10s, and in January 2023, Swift had actually made a surprise appearance at a 1975 show in London. Now, Swift and longtime paramour Joe Alwyn were reportedly through, and rumors about her and Healy being in a relationship were flying. It made for an unusually controversial topic of discussion around the traditionally backlash-averse Swift, as her relatively clean public image made for a stark contrast with Healy’s longtime affinity for provocation – most recently, offensive comments he’d made about Ice Spice during a podcast interview. Countless fans voiced their disapproval and hurt over Swift pairing with such a figure, and Ice Spice’s appearance within her fold less than a month later felt to many like an attempt to redeem her new beau’s reputation by proxy. 

Nonetheless, Swift’s relationship with Healy became top-tier tabloid fodder, and ensured that all eyes remained on the Eras Tour as it wound its way through the States during the spring and early summer. The arrival of Eras in a new town every weekend brought with it not only an avalanche of hype, media attention and near-groveling from the host cities, but enough traveling business to give local economies a notable boost. Cities like Las Vegas and Philadelphia had reportedly seen their tourism levels rise to pre-pandemic levels upon her visits, and research company QuestionPro ultimately estimated that the tour could raise as much as $4.6 billion for all its host cities combined – even leading to debate on The View over whether Swift was doing more for the national economy than President Biden. 

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It helped that by that point, the tour had its own hit single adding to its promotion – and for once, it was one that Swift herself couldn’t have planned or predicted. “Cruel Summer,” a sparkling album cut off 2019’s Lover, had been a fan (and critic) favorite and regular high-performer on streaming for years, but with its plum second-from-the-top placement within the Eras setlist – and with the weather heating up – consumption of the song kicked into high gear. In June, it reappeared on the Hot 100 for the first time in four years, and Swift soon seized the moment, announcing its release as an official single a few weeks later. Radio quickly jumped on board – it ultimately spent 10 weeks atop Pop Airplay, her longest-ever reign on that chart – and in July, the song climbed into the Hot 100’s top 10. 

The overdue success of “Summer” continued a trend first started by the “All Too Well” revival of two years earlier, where even her should’ve-been-smashes from years past were being validated with the kind of chart success they’d been largely ineligible for in real time. “Summer” in particular represented a sort of fascinating hypothetical for Swifties, because the lead single Swift had released from Lover – the jarringly jejune and poorly received “ME!” – was an extremely rare miscalculation, tainting the entire album era. With “Summer” becoming the kind of consensus-beloved smash four years later that “ME!” was never going to be, Swift not only got to boost her numbers for 2023, but she also got to belatedly redeem her narrative for 2019, fixing her past while plotting her future. 

And in truth, “Cruel Summer” was just the tip of the spear for the full-on streaming onslaught that the Eras Tour represented for Taylor Swift. For the first eight weeks of her tour, her streaming numbers rose across the board in each frame – ultimately leading to a 79% total boost in her streaming performance, for numbers that were already ozone-high. Her catalog-wide consumption was so vast that in July, she notched four albums simultaneously in the top 10 of the Billboard 200, becoming the first living artist to accomplish that feat since Herb Alpert six decades earlier. (By year’s end, she’d become the first to get a full five at once.) 

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One of those four July albums was her first Taylor’s Version re-recording for 2023, of 2010’s Swiftie-beloved Speak Now. The set featured the usual barrage of bonus cuts, and some particularly enticing collaborations with period-appropriate special guests like Fall Out Boy and Hayley Williams of Paramore. Best of the bunch was the slinking solo performance “I Can See You,” which sounded like the undeniable radio smash that Speak Now never totally produced, the lone thing missing from the album’s resumé. It became the highest-charting song from the new Speak Now, debuting at No. 5 on the Hot 100, as the album became her third straight re-recording to bow atop the Billboard 200 – with a whopping 716,000 first-week units, the best number yet for any Taylor’s Version, and also the biggest number for any album released to that point in 2023. 

If Taylor Swift’s year had ended as the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour began to wind down in late July and early August, she already would have done more than enough to easily capture our No. 1 spot in these rankings. She even took a kind of mid-season victory lap at September’s MTV Video Music Awards – which has essentially served as Swift’s pop culture home base, ever since she unwittingly played a key role in the show’s all-time signature moment back in 2009. Without performing, she was still the show’s focal point all night, as she hung out with Ice Spice, gushed about presenters *NSYNC, Nelly Furtado and Timbaland, and collected nine awards, including song and video of the year for “Anti-Hero” – her second-straight win and fourth total in the latter category, double the amount of any other artist. 

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But Swift’s year was nowhere near done – in fact, the biggest moments were yet to come, as would become abundantly clear on that aforementioned Sept. 24 date. To the relief of untold numbers of Swifties, her fling with Healy had run its course months earlier, and now rumors were beginning to swirl about her and Kelce. The Chiefs star had become increasingly coy in his comments about the pop icon, saying he’d invited her to come see him play a home game (after he’d seen her Eras show in Kansas City that July). She did indeed do just that on the 24th, with her presence at Arrowhead sending both the worlds of sports and pop culture into a frenzy, and leading to numerous posts and videos of non-football-conversant Swifties sharing the sport’s rules with one another, so they could better understand what was happening in between the shots of their hero in a private box with Kelce’s mom Donna. 

From then on, every Sunday (and a couple Mondays and Thursdays) of 2023 was overtaken with Taylor talk: Would she be showing up at the Chiefs’ next game? What other celebrities would she be attending with? What kind of Kelce swag would she be wearing, and what would that mean about their relationship? What do you mean Kansas City is on a bye week? While Swift’s short relationship with Healy was extremely controversial to Swifties and her long relationship with Alwyn was largely uninteresting to everyone else, her love story with Kelce – a well-liked, unproblematic figure, a Super Bowl-winning superstar as an athlete with enough of a Q rating as a celebrity to host SNL – was universally accessible, and found near-100% public approval. You didn’t need deep grounding in Swift Lore to understand the relationship, because it just felt right: the All-American athlete dating the All-American pop star. 

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As her second 2023 tour of America’s football stadiums continued through October, Swift also had a new project to promote: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, the concert film documentary shot across her August dates at SoFi Stadium in California. While such concert docs have historically been fan-only fare, with limited box-office ceilings, news of The Eras Tour was greeted as if it was the new Marvel blockbuster – and with commercial expectations to match, as insiders projected it could earn as much as $100 million in its opening weekend. Swift released the movie directly through theater chain AMC’s screening and distribution, and even with the brand beefing up its ticket sales systems to five times their usual capacity in advance of the Eras ticket pre-sale, they still crashed due to overwhelming demand. No business could properly quantify or contain Swfitie enthusiasm in 2023. 

Following a glammy L.A. premiere – including an appearance from Beyoncé, perhaps the only current pop star with the unimpeachable legacy and continued greatness to qualify as a “get” for such Swift events – Swifties descended upon the nation’s AMC theaters the weekend of Oct. 13 for the Eras film debut. Fans sang (and filmed) along, countless friendship bracelets were exchanged, and the film raked in $92.8 million – short of the $100 optimistically projected (darn), but still enough to make it the highest-grossing concert film ever in just three days of release. Meanwhile, Swift took the opportunity to take care of some unfinished business: With “Cruel Summer” lingering around the Hot 100’s top 5 for months but unable to claim the top spot, she released the three-song “Cruelest Summer” pack to celebrate the song’s Eras-boosted success – “for old times sake” – with a new live version and a new Giobbi remix of the song. Following the added consumption from the extra versions, “Cruel Summer” finally hit No. 1 the next week.  

And then, the capper. While Swifties had ravenously consumed each of Swift’s three Taylor’s Version re-recordings, there was one that was anticipated above all others: 1989, the 2014 mega-blockbuster that fully completed her crossover to pop superstardom and was still treasured by fans as the defining album of that pop era. Swift had announced the release of her new 1989 onstage at the final show of her Eras Tour U.S. leg in August, and in late October, it was finally set to be released. However, following a full year of Taylormania, dating back to Midnights the prior October – and only three months after Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), two weeks after the Eras Tour film, and with “Cruel Summer” still holding atop the Hot 100 – some had to wonder: Has it been too much Taylor? Will fans really have the capacity to come out in full force for another album of re-recordings? 

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The first-week numbers for 1989 (Taylor’s Version) answered those questions with a definitive no and yes, respectively. The re-recording debuted with a near-unthinkable 1.653 million units, including 1.359 million in pure sales: both numbers passing every other Taylor’s Version, passing Midnights, even passing the debut week for the original 1989. (Passing every other release of the 2020s as well, though Swift beating everyone else had ceased to be as impressive as besting her own marks.) The set’s five new bonus tracks were also well-received by fans and critics, particularly “Slut!,” which offered a new look at Swift’s vulnerability under the peak media glare of the 1989 era, and “Is It Over Now?,” which debuted atop the Hot 100, becoming her third song to hit No. 1 in 2023.

Swift’s year wound down with her scoring six nominations for the 2024 Grammys (including album of the year for Midnights and song and record of the year for “Anti-Hero”) while resuming her Eras touring in South America. Sadly, tragedy struck at one of her Brazil dates in November: a fan died at her show, with many pointing to extreme temperatures and a scarcity of available water (and rules prohibiting fans from bringing in their own) as a potential cause. Swift shared her condolences over Instagram, saying she had a “shattered heart,” and canceled her Brazil show the next night due to continued “extreme temperatures” and safety concerns. (Local authorities announced that free water would be made available at all future shows.) 

The Eras Tour finally wrapped for the year in late November, with Swift scheduled to pick things back up in Tokyo in February. Official Box Score numbers have yet to be reported for the tour’s 53 dates so far, but Billboard projects the total number to be upwards of $900 million – already enough to zoom past Elton John’s current mark for the highest-grossing North American tour of the Box Score era, with his Farewell Yellow Brick Road trek taking in $567.7 million over 135 shows – and that she might double that number with her 2024 dates. In fact, between her music sales and streams, tour receipts and box office returns, Billboard estimates that Swift made nearly $2 billion in 2023 alone, numbers which don’t even account for her financial wins from synchs, sponsorships and merchandise.

Still, while the staggering numbers certainly suggest the enormity of Taylor Swift’s 2023, they don’t totally capture it. It’s also about going to any airport, any city center, anywhere with a large gathering of people – not even necessarily music fans – and seeing multiple Eras Tour tees and hoodies. It’s about watching a TV show like the critically beloved The Bear, and getting blindsided by the emotional power of an unlikely character having a cathartic singalong to “Love Story” (Taylor’s Version, no less). It’s about memory-testing quiz site Sporcle creating a category just for user-submitted Swift tests, the only artist besides The Beatles with their own. It’s about no less authoritative and competitive a pop authority than Drake – Drake!! – admitting on record that he delayed a project’s release to avoid her crossfire: “Taylor Swift the only n-–a that I ever rated/ Only one could make me drop the album just a little later.” 

And it’s about looking at the current pop landscape and seeing Swift’s impact absolutely everywhere. It’s in the breakout of singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, who’s acknowledged that the pandemic-era acclaim for her Folklore and Evermore albums helped open a mainstream lane for his brand of alt-folk. It’s in the sophomore success of Olivia Rodrigo, who’s been following in the Taylor Swift career mold so well through her first three years of recording that she even just released an eerie Hunger Games ballad. It’s in the first-ever Hot 100 hits for obvious acolytes like Lizzy McAlpine and Gracie Abrams. It’s even in the recent triumphs of stars like Zach Bryan and SZA, whose musical trees don’t branch up to Swift, but who are certainly benefiting from the raised commercial ceiling she’s allowed for artists whose emphasis is first and foremost on detailed, personal songwriting. 

All of this raises the obvious question: Where does Taylor Swift’s 2023 rank among the greatest years any pop star has ever had? Was it greater than The Beatles’ 1964, Michael Jackson’s 1983, Britney Spears’ 1999, Beyoncé’s 2003, or Adele’s 2011? It’s certainly on that all-time shortlist, but it’s also exceptionally hard to compare to most of the other folks on there – largely because every other artist’s mega-year on that list was defined and driven first and foremost by unavoidable, culture-defining hit singles, which have always served as the lifeblood of pop success. But while hits certainly played a part in Taylor Swift’s 2023 – she did have three No. 1s, after all, and 53 total Hot 100 entries – they weren’t really what powered her success. None of her No. 1s were even properly from this year; “Anti-Hero” was a 2022 holdover, “Cruel Summer” was a 2019 reclamation, and “Is It Over Now?” dates back a whole decade in origin. In truth, the hits were more effect than cause for Swift’s pop mega-success: She could have had none of them and still ruled easily over these rankings this year. 

It’s not totally clear how her year relates to the past, but what’s abundantly clear is that Swift’s 2023 will now be the year that all future pop stars will be measured against. Swift has shown that as powerful as a viral hit can be, it’s absolutely nothing compared to a viral tour, a viral catalog, a viral… everything. Really, Taylor Swift spent 2023 in a perpetual state of virality – something that sounds like it would be unsustainable if not outright dangerous for most pop stars, but something that after 15 years in the spotlight, she seemed absolutely ready and game for. Consequently, she is on a level of pop stardom right now that no other contemporary artist is even approaching, and remarkably few would be able to hold onto if they ever got there. 

You can ask whether that’s a good thing for pop music, or even for Taylor Swift. When an artist’s success becomes divorced from their need for conventional hits, it can result in artistic complacency; just ask Drake superfans how they feel about his last five years of output, after it became clear he’d dominate the charts with every new album and single no matter what kind of consensus they held about its quality. And top 40 has also long thrived on the greats at least having plausible contemporary rivals who pushed them to higher heights: The Beatles had The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys, Michael Jackson had Prince and Madonna, Britney Spears had the entire TRL teen-pop dynasty. Without that level of healthy competition, everyone suffers. 

You can ask whether it’s a good thing for pop fans, too. Certainly the public appetite for Swift remains enormous, and has been well-earned following her decade and a half of consistent pop excellence. But one star can sustain that level of approval for only so long – and who knows how many music fans right now have already begun to hit their fill point with how much Swift they can handle in their lives. Plus, with the Eras Tour set to continue on through all next year, and with two remaining Taylor’s Versions still to go – not to mention what other new material could be on the way – there’s no obvious break from the Taylorverse coming anytime soon. It’s not inconceivable that we could be back here this time next year, talking about how as big as her 2023 was, we never could have predicted how much bigger still her 2024 was going to get. 

But if you do have to hand it to Taylor Swift’s 2023 for one thing, it’s this: Pop history is littered with frustrating what-if stories. Artists who made a major miscalculation with a song or album, artists who got in bed (literally or metaphorically) with the wrong people, artists who changed their sound or style too soon (or not soon enough), artists who took a couple years off at the worst possible time, artists whose personal lives overwhelmed their musical output or vice versa. And there is something not just awe-inspiring, but deeply satisfying, about watching an artist who made every single right decision for years and saw it all come together in one year of total untouchability. There is no wasted potential with Taylor Swift, no what ifs – the chance was there for her to have one of the greatest years any pop star has ever had, and you know that she grabbed it. Taylor was here. No one who was around for her 2023 will ever forget it. 

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2023 all this week. At No. 7, we remember the year in Olivia Rodrigo — who avoided the sophomore slump and continued to define both pop and rock stardom for her generation with one of the year’s most acclaimed albums.

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“It’s a lot of pressure,” Olivia Rodrigo admitted to Billboard upon the June release of “Vampire” — the lead single to her sophomore album, which was one of most anxiously awaited albums of 2023. “I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel that.”

It’d be one thing if Rodrigo had followed Sour — her 2021 debut featuring smashes like “Drivers License” and “good 4 u,” which turned into one of the most successful pop albums of the decade — with any sort of stopgap singles or deluxe-edition goodies for fans. But her decision to limit her studio output, as the rare pop star content to hole away until their next full-length statement is ready for unveiling, built enormous anticipation (and expectation) for its follow-up. “It’s very nerve-racking,” Rodrigo continued. “I haven’t put out music in, what, two years now?”

Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2023:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Peso Pluma | Comeback of the Year: Miley Cyrus | No. 10: Drake | No. 9: Doja Cat | No. 8: Bad Bunny

“Vampire” dramatically ended that drought. After some social media teases, the single arrived as a gut-punch to a bloodsucking, fame-f–king ex at the end of June, and demonstrated that Rodrigo wasn’t going to trend-chase with her sophomore effort. A theatrical piano ballad with a slow build-up, halting refrain and multiple tempo changes, “Vampire” sounded unlike anything else on pop radio upon its arrival — but fans reveled in the outsized scale, critics were on board, and the song debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100, officially announcing that one of the decade’s brightest new stars had returned.

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“Bad Idea, Right?” followed in August, and scratched the itch for “good 4 u” fans hoping that more guitar-heavy punk leanings were on the way. In addition to scoring a top 10 debut on the Hot 100, the second single refined Rodrigo’s pop-rock aesthetic — the guitar chugs and blurted-out verses a bit more delicious, the backing harmonies and chorus flare-up a little more immediate.

And when Guts, Rodrigo’s sophomore album, arrived in full in September, the full scope of that artistic evolution was clear. Once again working alongside producer-songwriter Dan Nigro, Rodrigo made sure every post-childhood fear, romantic agitation and cynical realization landed with emotional clarity and instrumental force, whether through a thicket of guitar fuzz or beautifully restrained balladry. Guts scored a No. 1 debut on the Billboard 200 with a slightly higher equivalent albums unit total than Sour, while also receiving rave reviews upon its release; fans kept the new full-length on repeat, while critics confirmed that Rodrigo had avoided the sophomore slump.

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Building upon the momentum of the album release, Rodrigo announced the Guts World Tour, which will bring her around the globe as an arena headliner for the first time, with one of the hottest tickets of 2024’s touring slate. Meanwhile, she stayed visible after the album’s release – particularly with third single “Get Him Back!,” which harnessed a similar guitar-crunch energy as “Bad Idea, Right?”  “Get Him Back!” received a pronounced promotional push, complete with an MTV Video Music Awards performance, Apple iPhone commercial synch and even an appearance in the trailer for the upcoming Mean Girls musical film adaptation.

The accolades piled up for Guts as 2023 started to wind down: the album is all over critics’ year-end list, including at the top of Billboard’s staff list of the best albums of 2023. After winning best new artist at the Grammy Awards in 2022, Rodrigo will try to snag the other three Big Four categories: Guts is up for album of the year, and “Vampire” is nominated for both record of the year and song of the year, as part of Rodrigo’s six total 2024 nominations. Rodrigo spent December showcasing her Guts material on platforms like Saturday Night Live and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert – although Rodrigo has already provided a stopgap single that she resisted between Sour and Guts. “Can’t Catch Me Now,” the heartfelt soundtrack single from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, continues to grow as a hit outside of the film franchise following its November release. 

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The pressure that Rodrigo felt at the beginning of 2023 was understandable: Sour was the type of debut album that checked every commercial and critical box for a new pop star, and nothing was promised as she prepared to follow it up. With her second album era well underway, however, Rodrigo has proven herself as a durable, consistently exciting voice at the forefront of popular music. She is still only 20 years old, but Rodrigo had demonstrated remarkable poise as she has crafted a singular career, continued to score hits, transcended genre and deployed her artistry across a variety of mediums. Early next year, she’ll compete against Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Billie Eilish and Miley Cyrus in key Grammy categories, and she has adeptly absorbed pieces of those artists’ respective careers — from the uncompromising songwriting, to the chart consistency, to the ability to rock out for pop fans and have them clamoring for more.

Time and again, Rodrigo meets, and exceeds, the expectations placed upon her. And because of that, her future couldn’t be brighter.

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2023 all this week. At No. 9, we remember the year in Doja Cat — a consistently challenging and successful pop star who rarely makes it easy for her fans, but continues to build one of the most vital and rewarding careers in 2020s pop.
When she entered 2023 with five Grammy nominations – off the back of a Post Malone collab, a late-stage Planet Her single and a hit from the Elvis soundtrack – Doja Cat knew something the rest of us didn’t quite yet get: We’re not getting rid of her anytime soon. After reaching top 40’s zenith with the frothy Planet Her two years prior (the album peaked at No. 2 and spawned five consecutive top 20 hits), Doja Cat spent 2023 setting fire to that pop-forward version of herself – and she still proved to be one of the year’s most dominant pop stars in the process. 

Before Doja attended the Grammys in a black latex gown that signaled a stark tonal and aesthetic shit from the pink and purple hues of Planet Her, she took on Paris Fashion Week while decked out in head-to-toe red body paint and 30,000 hand-applied Swarovski crystals – an instantly viral moment that reaffirmed Doja’s singular wielding of fashion in her greater artist project and further proved the irrefutability of her star power. The punk and horror influences in her new wardrobe would soon reverberate through the rest of her 2023 – but, then again, those seeds were truly thrown when she shaved her head last summer:  an aesthetic decision that became a key symbol of the Scarlet era. 

Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2023:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Peso Pluma | Comeback of the Year: Miley Cyrus | No. 10: Drake

Doja’s first piece of new music came by way of an April “Kill Bill” remix, the year-defining hit single from Grammy-winning “Kiss Me More” duet partner SZA. Her Eminem-nodding guest verse used the song’s boom-bap-infused beat as a catalyst for Doja’s intentional repositioning as a rapper in the “traditional sense.” Her remix helped push “Kill Bill” to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 – although chart credit evaded her in this case – and primed fans for her new era.

Jacob Webster

Jacob Webster

She kicked off the following month at the MET Gala with a purr-fect ensemble inspired by the late Karl Lagerfeld’s pet cat, but that moment quickly gave way to Doja’s first major controversy of the year.  

“[Planet Her] and [Hot Pink] were cash-grabs and yall fell for it,” she wrote on Twitter (now X) on May 9. “Now [I] can go disappear somewhere and touch grass with my loved ones on an island while yall weep for mediocre pop.” Ironically, the hits from those albums helped Doja win the songwriter of the year award she accepted from the BMI Pop Awards that same day. After garnering legions of fans thanks to her pristine pop-rap bops, Doja seemed hellbent on obliterating that; large portions of her fan base were incredibly vocal in their objections to Doja’s remarks, but the tirade didn’t derail her year. 

“Attention,” the first taste of Scarlet, arrived on Jun. 16, earning a warm reception from critics, who lauded Doja’s focus on deft lyricism and her further exploration of those boom-bap influences. Fans greeted the song with a more middling reception; “Attention” spent just three weeks on the Hot 100 and peaked at No. 31. Doja went a bit quiet after “Attention,” but she came back with an even more contentious tirade the following month. “My fans don’t get to name themselves s–t,” she wrote on Threads. “If you call yourself a ‘Kitten’ or f–king ‘Kittenz’ that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house.” Once again intentionally antagonizing her fanbase, Doja found herself embroiled in a controversy that tested consumers’ patience with her, ultimately culminating in nearly 240,000 lost Instagram followers in under a week. 

Nonetheless, as she proved with her infamous career-threatening chat room controversy back in 2020, Doja Cat has nine lives – and maybe a few extra. The Grammy-winner quickly turned her fortunes around with “Paint the Town Red,” a bouncy Dionne Warwick-sampling track that became both her highest-debuting solo song and the first hip-hop song to top the Hot 100 in 2023. The song grew into a juggernaut on radio – it’s spent seven weeks atop both Pop and Rhythmic Airplay – and became ubiquitous on TikTok without the help of an over-arching dance challenge or trend, further cementing her as star that moves the culture, not one that happens to be buoyed by one of its myriad waves.  “Paint” topped the Hot 100 the same week Doja stole the MTV Video Music Awards with a three-song medley — “Paint,” “Attention,” and horrorcore-leaning promo single “Demons” — that reminded audiences of her performance prowess and gifted consumers the first look at Doja’s vision for Scarlet in a live setting. At the ceremony, “Attention” picked up a Moonperson – Doja’s fifth – for best art direction. 

Although Doja had fully fleshed out her Scarlet alter ego by the VMAs, she was still trying on different titles for the record. (Remember Hellmouth? First of All?) Moreover, the singles were a far cry from the “no more pop” and “French conceptual experimental country/bohemian fusion with the essence of bluegrass” descriptors she (sometimes jokingly) gave to fans. Nonetheless, Scarlet arrived in all of its jazz rap-meets-lo-fi-meets horrorcore glory on Sept. 20. Reviews were favorable, but unimpressive first week numbers (No. 4, 72,000 units earned) signaled that Doja couldn’t quite translate the success of “Paint the Town Red” to its parent LP. Fans were still showing up for her, but they didn’t quite love what she was dishing out, some of which included sporting an ill-received t-shirt featuring alt-right comedian Sam Hyde. 

As she did with Planet Her, Doja seems to be playing the long game with Scarlet. Her Ice Spice and Doechii-assisted headlining arena tour has been trekking across the U.S., and “Agora Hills,” an instant Scarlet standout – is already growing into the album’s second major hit, currently sitting at No. 24 on the Hot 100. With Scarlet, which ended 2023 as one of the Billboard staff’s 10 favorite albums of the year, Doja challenged both her fans and pop music at large more than any of her contemporaries. That fearlessness didn’t always pay off, but it did always keep her at the forefront of the conversation –  further cementing her as arguably the most consistent pop star of the 2020s, and one of only four artists to appear on all three Greatest Pop Star top 10 rankings Billboard has done this decade.

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2023 all next week. At No. 10, we remember the year in Drake — a veteran superstar whose current work longtime fans are increasingly divided over, but who can still always just point to the scoreboard for proof of his rap and pop supremacy.
The turn of the year was quiet for Drake, by the prolific megastar’s standards— after dropping his eighth studio album Her Loss at the top of November, he sat back and watched the album top the charts— but by December, the hype was dwindling. Only three songs remained in the Hot 100 by December 31: “Rich Flex,” “Spin Bout U,” and “Circo Loco,” with the highest placing at No. 20. The only things that Drake had left on his agenda for the year were two highly-anticipated sold out shows at the Apollo Theater. A week before they were slated to take place in November, Migos rapper Takeoff tragically passed away, and production issues set the performances back further. Perhaps it was appropriate that the rap game was silent.

Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2023:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Peso Pluma | Comeback of the Year: Miley Cyrus 

Drake started 2023 on a high note: he returned to the stage at the Apollo, delighting fans with a career-spanning mix of his biggest hits and deep cuts and giving fans a taste of what was to come. Shortly after, he announced the It’s All a Blur tour with 21 Savage in March, with 29 shows scheduled across the U.S. and Canada. He quickly capitalized upon the excitement by expanding his tour with an additional 15 shows – and for a moment, everything surrounding Drake was good, clean fun. In true Drake style, that did not last for long. 

Prince Williams/Wireimage

Courtesy OVO/Republic Records

One of Drake’s greatest star strengths is his ability to create headline-worthy moments that are controversial, but not career-jeopardizingly damning. He once again stirred the pot in his on-and-off relationship with Kanye West with the single “Search & Rescue” by including audio of Kim Kardashian talking about her former husband. This left fans wondering if the soundbite was just fitting of the track’s theme, or if it was a deeper dig at Drake’s frenemy. Regardless of intent, discussion of the potential beef helped propel the track to a No. 2 debut on the Hot 100.

Interestingly, though, the biggest controversy the superstar had around this time didn’t even involve music: seemingly out of nowhere, Drake appeared on Bobbi Althoff’s The Really Good Podcast, giving fans a rare sit down with the rapper that showcased his humor while skyrocketing Althoff to fame. The general population was not particularly familiar with Althoff – who transitioned from making content for moms on TikTok to rebranding with a new podcast and a new aloof, deadpan persona in 2021 – so, when Drake sat down with her, the intentionally awkward conversation broke the internet. Should Drake have given such a platform to such an amateur talent who was unfamiliar with hip-hop? Was Bobbi’s interview insulting? The internet debated for months following the episode, further fueled by the fact that the full video was later taken down from Althoff’s channel.

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Summer was when things started to pick up for Drake in 2023: a string of buzzy guest appearances and collaborations kept fans on the hook: “Who Told You” with J Hus, “On the Radar Freestyle” with Central Cee, “Oh U Went” with Young Thug, and “Meltdown” with Travis Scott each had their moments. Despite the hype surrounding each of these releases, none of them took off quite like the rapper’s previous work. Instead, Drake found success in entertaining his audience with the It’s All a Blur Tour, earning $147.5 million for the year, according to numbers reported to Billboard Box Score.

The It’s All a Blur tour was a massive success beyond numbers: It further proved that Drake remains an undeniable pop star. Each show generated new viral moments, both positive and negative. Some fans complained that Drake was ranting for too long or forgetting his own lyrics, but the tour was widely praised overall. Fans were surprised by the visuals, including a drone-powered flying sperm, and Drake personally surprising audience members with luxury gifts including $50,000 and an Hermès Birkin bag. Attendees of the tour were even given the chance to grab a pair of NOCTA Nike Hot Step Air Terras, courtesy of Drake’s partnership with Shopify, Drake Related. It seemed as if Drake had an infinite number of tricks up his sleeve— and then came his next album, For All The Dogs. 

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Pressure was high for Drake to release a strong album. After experiencing a dip in both fan enthusiasm and chart performance with Honestly, Nevermind, and regaining his footing with Her Loss, the Toronto rapper came back with a lot to prove on Dogs. Its lead single, “Slime You Out” featuring SZA, excited fans due to the artists’ shared history. The superstar pairing and exchange of jabs on the track helped it soar to No. 1 on the Hot 100. But ultimately, fans found the track disappointing — as did legendary actress Halle Berry, who was featured in the cover art without her approval, and co-star SZA, who claims her best vocals were not incorporated. It quickly fell down the chart. Still, fans were excited to hear Drake’s latest body of work, which was first promised to drop a week after. However, after debating whether he should cancel his final tour dates to finish the album, Drake pushed back the release from Sept. 22 to Oct. 6.

Once released, For All The Dogs proved that Drake remains commercially bulletproof. Critics poked holes in the 23-track release, saying that it was too long, that the lyrics were too corny and surface level and that Drake’s sentiments felt glaringly misogynistic. Still, the album debuted at No. 1, tying Michael Jackson’s record for solo males on the Billboard Hot 100 with J. Cole team-up “First Person Shooter.” The varied offering with a stacked list of featured artists had several strong moments, mainly tied to collaborations with Cole, Yeat and Sexyy Red, but fans continue to cite Drake’s older works as his prime. One featured artist was unexpected and refreshing for everyone: the incorporation of Adonis, Drake’s 6-year-old son, now a burgeoning visual artist. Adonis’ drawing was used as the cover artwork for Dogs, and that drawing was further integrated into the Dogs era via inclusion in the music video for “8am in Charlotte.” 

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Following the release of Dogs, Drake’s moves were unpredictable. He said that he would be taking a hiatus to focus on his health – a claim that made sense as it came on the heels of Drake revealing that he suffered from stomach issues on tour, on top of the many previous years of nonstop grinding. The world was ready to give Drake a break. But then he dropped Adonis’ “My Man Freestyle,” and just a few weeks after that, he dropped the video for “First Person Shooter,” an elaborate production laden with pop culture references to things like the Spider-Man meme and the famous photo of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi playing chess. 

But the biggest curveball of all came on Nov. 17: Drake dropped the surprise Scary Hours Edition reissue of For All the Dogs, adding six new songs to the tracklist, and dates for a 2024 U.S. run titled the It’s All a Blur Tour – Big as the What? with support from J. Cole. In hindsight, Drake might have foretold this change of plans on new Scary Hours track “Stories About My Brother,” as he described a return: “the storm before the calm, we’ll get to the vacation later.”

Once again, Drake has reminded us to expect the unexpected – it’s what’s made him omnipresent in both 2023 and in our lives for the past decade and a half, for better or worse. With a tour on the horizon, we’re not too likely to stop hearing from the 6 God in 2024, either.

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2023 all next week. First, a salute to the artist who made the most impressive comeback this year: pop icon Miley Cyrus, who found herself back atop the top 40 world for the first time in a decade.
Ahead of her Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party to ring in 2023, Miley Cyrus said in an interview that her new year’s resolution was to “listen” more. Well, does it count if more people than ever listened to her this year? 

Cyrus hit the ground sprinting in 2023, using her second NBC NYE special – during which she co-hosted with godmother Dolly Parton and duetted on an inspired mash-up of “Wrecking Ball” and “I Will Always Love You” – to announce a brand-new song called “Flowers,” along with the tagline “New Year, New Miley, New Single.” She seized on the sleepy January news cycle and sent fans into overdrive, as the Smilers eagerly pieced together clues to decode the instantly buzzy song’s meaning. The lyric teasers pointed to a post-breakup epiphany (“I can love me better than you can”) and the release date was Jan. 13 – which just so happens to be the birthday of Cyrus’ ex-husband Liam Hemsworth. 

But this song was so much more than just an Easter egg hunt around Cyrus’ high-profile love life — and, in the end, the song ended up arriving a few hours early, so the much-ballyhooed release date wasn’t even her ex’s b-day after all. While Cyrus has consistently released music over the years, this felt like her first truly must-listen moment of the decade — and indeed, it was about to be the biggest hit of her already-impressive career. 

NOUA UNU Studio

NOUA UNU Studio

“Flowers” – which Cyrus co-wrote with Gregory Aldae Hein and Michael Pollack, and was produced by Harry Styles’ sunshiny secret weapons Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson – was immediately embraced by a cross-generational cast of characters when it arrived alongside a glossy music video (which boasts nearly 650 million views on YouTube). There was Gloria Gaynor — she of the ultimate life-after-heartbreak anthem “I Will Survive,” a frequent point of comparison for “Flowers” — who told Cyrus via social media: “Your new song carries the torch of empowerment and encourages everyone to find strength in themselves to persevere and thrive. Well done Miley!” Then there was Diane Keaton, who posted a video dancing with her dog through tall grass and wrote to Cyrus: “YOUR INCREDIBLE SONG GAVE ME A REASON TO DANCE IN MY OWN BACKYARD!” 

Once the full song was released, fans continued their full-time investigation into all its Liam lyrical clues, like when Cyrus sings in the first verse “built a home and watched it burn,” seemingly in reference to the 2018 Malibu fire that claimed the then-married couple’s home. But the analysis also shifted to a new focus: the song’s clear link to Bruno Mars’ 2012 hit “When I Was Your Man.” (Bruno: “I should have bought you flowers.” Miley: “I can buy myself flowers.” Bruno: “Take you to every party ’cause all you wanted to do was dance.” Miley: “I can take myself dancing.”) In fact, it appears that “Flowers” is an answer to all the overly sentimental heartbreak songs that came before it – as Gaynor noted, instead of carrying a torch for her ex, Cyrus is carrying “the torch of empowerment.” 

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And boy, did that message resonate. On Jan. 24, “Flowers” debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100 – only Cyrus’ second No. 1 on the chart, following the three-week reign of “Wrecking Ball” 10 years earlier – and also launched as the biggest song in the world, reigning on the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts too. On Jan. 19, it became the most-streamed song in a single week in Spotify history – only to rewrite the streamer’s record with an even bigger week 2. A sampling of other “Flowers” feats: It spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100; it has the longest No. 1 run for a female artist ever on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary (34 weeks) and Adult Pop Airplay (17 weeks) charts; it’s the quickest song to hit 1 billion streams in Spotify history; and it was named the fourth-best song of 2023 by the Billboard staff.  

The way “Flowers” loomed so large throughout the year threatened to overshadow the rest of Cyrus’ 2023, during which she released her eighth studio album Endless Summer Vacation in March to a No. 3 debut (and her biggest sales week since the Billboard 200 switched from a purely album sales-based chart to one using equivalent album units in 2014). The album – which arrived with a music video for second single “River” (helping it reach the Hot 100’s top 40) followed the next month by “Jaded” (top 10 on Adult Pop Airplay) — landed in the top 20 on Billboard’s best albums of 2023 staff list, with awards editor Paul Grein calling it “one of the year’s finest pop comebacks.” 

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And the Vacation wasn’t over yet: Cyrus had another top 10 debut on the Hot 100 (and a new Diane Keaton co-sign) with “Used to Be Young,” a wistful, raspy ballad that arrived as part of the deluxe digital edition of the album in August. In a nostalgic nod to Cyrus’ early days, “Young” just so happened to arrive the same week as Selena Gomez’s “Single Soon.” The Disney Channel alumnae played up the timing, as Wizards of Waverly Place star Gomez shared a clip of her own throwback Hannah Montana cameo with the caption: “@mileycyrus and I both have a SINGLE SOON and we are releasing on the same day. We have been friends since we USED TO BE YOUNG. Excited for August 25th!” More than three months later, “Used to Be Young” is still hanging around the Hot 100 top 40, and just topped the Adult Pop Airplay chart for the first time.  

But what truly stood out this year is the Recording Academy finally paying attention to Cyrus’ work. When the 2024 Grammy nominations were announced Nov. 10, Cyrus came away with six nods – triple the two she’d previously received over her more than 15-year career – including the Big Four categories of song and record of the year for “Flowers” and album of the year for Vacation. “It’s fun to be nominated & exciting to win but having my music be LOVED around the world is the real trophy,” Cyrus said in reaction to the nom news on social media. 

Despite starting the year with a television special, Cyrus was overall a little absent on the promotional front, and from the sounds of her May cover interview with British Vogue, she’s not sure she wants to tour again. “Like singing for hundreds of thousands of people isn’t really the thing that I love,” she said. “There’s no connection. There’s no safety. It’s also not natural. It’s so isolating because if you’re in front of 100,000 people, then you are alone.” She waited until Nov. 21 to finally perform “Flowers” in front of an audience for the very first time, but the invite-only crowd at LA’s Chateau Marmont probably didn’t even approach 100, let alone 100,000. A week later, as a thank you to fans, she shared a black-and-white video of the jazzy performance, backed by just a piano and sprinkled with cheeky ad libs (“I didn’t want to leave you … but I had to!/ I didn’t want to fight … but we did!”). 

In that new year’s resolution video at the top of the year, Cyrus was also asked by Today show host Hoda Kotb how she’s different now as a 30-year-old (Cyrus just turned 31 on Nov. 23) versus her younger days. “It’s somehow that I’m completely different and somehow I’m exactly the same,” she answered. That can really be said about her comeback success with “Flowers” too: The song is both the most grown-up and fully realized song we’ve ever heard from the Hannah Montana child star-turned-adult pop powerhouse, while still embodying the carefree, no-effs-given attitude that has made her such a firebrand throughout her career. 

The last time she topped the Hot 100, she came in like a wrecking ball. This time, she comes bearing flowers. But she’s still just being Miley.