Greatest Pop Stars of 2024
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For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — having already revealed our Honorable Mentions, our Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all last week, and our No. 10, No. 9 and No. 8 Greatest Pop Stars earlier this week. Now, at No. 7, we remember the year in Beyoncé — who returned with one of the year’s most ambitious albums and change the game yet again.
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“OK, they ready: Drop the new music.”
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It was a quintessentially Beyoncé moment, the kind that has come to define the last decade-plus of her continually bar-raising 21st century pop superstardom. Greeting TV viewers around the world during the most-watched event of the year – February’s Super Bowl – Beyoncé co-starred with Veep actor Tony Hale in a Verizon ad in which she kept attempting to literally break the internet, to no avail. At the very end of the spot, having still failed to break the internet – even as “the first woman to launch the first rocket for the first performance in space” – she instead broke character, issuing the above decree over her spaceship’s intercom.
Lo and behold, two new songs magically appeared online immediately after: “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” presumed to be the first tastes of her upcoming album, the second part of the history-excavating trilogy project she kicked off in 2022 with the dance-oriented Renaissance. As fans raced to DSPs to confirm the rumors of new music that they were seeing on their social media feeds – likely ignoring whatever was transpiring between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers following their game’s resumption – it appeared that the artist who first stopped the world with that digital drop way back in late 2013 had done it again. You could practically hear the chuckling worldwide: Only Beyoncé.
But the songs that fans first greeted as part of Bey’s new project were not like other Beyoncé lead singles. From the opening banjos and stomping beat of “Texas,” it was clear that the rumors that had long circulated about her new LP were at least partially grounded in reality: This was going to be her country album, reclaiming the genre’s roots in Black music.
Renaissance had done the same two years earlier with club music, but as a modern pop star, Beyoncé always had at least a toe or two in dance music – she’d topped Billboard’s Dance/Club Songs chart a whopping 22 times in her career already, with various singles and remixes, by the time of that album’s release. Her history in country, however, was largely limited to one song: “Daddy Lessons,” from 2016’s Lemonade. That song was well received by fans and critics, but proved controversial within the country world; following her performance of the song at the 2016 CMA Awards (alongside the now-also-divisive The Chicks), complaints from viewers about Bey’s country qualifications flooded social media, while genre stalwart Alan Jackson reportedly had gotten up and left during the performance.
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If there was any doubt that Beyoncé could have success within the genre, though, the two new songs – particularly the hooting, dancefloor-storming “Texas” – quickly put them to bed. “Texas” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 with just over four days of tracking in its initial release week; the following frame, helped by TikTok virality that included various line-dance challenges, the song climbed to pole position, becoming her ninth career No. 1 as a solo artist (and 13th including her work in Destiny’s Child). It also topped Hot Country Songs, making Bey the first Black woman to top the chart in its 65-year history.
A month after, Bey announced the full parent album for the two songs, which would serve as “Act II” in the trilogy that Renaissance had kicked off: Cowboy Carter, whose cover featured Bey riding side-saddle on a white horse in full cowboy regalia, while brandishing an American flag. The album, the superstar explained in her Instagram reveal, had been “over five years in the making,” and was “born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t,” which inspired her to do a deep dive into country’s history – with the “experience” in question being assumed by most to be the 2016 CMAs performance. However, despite the project’s roots in country, Bey remained unequivocal on the album’s classification: “This ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.”
The new “Beyoncé” album arrived just a week and a half later: A 28-track journey through country’s past, present and future, Cowboy Carter was Bey’s highest-concept album yet, very deliberately paced and full of connective interludes and even paired at its bookends to essentially play in a continuous loop. It also had a guest list to match its simultaneously backwards- and forward-looking tracklist, including genre legends like Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Linda Martell, as well as rising artists like Willie Jones, Tanner Adell and Shaboozey, and even a couple lightly country-adjacent established pop stars in Miley Cyrus and Post Malone. But given the album’s explorations into both folkier and rockier territory, as well as with Bey’s usual inflections of pop and R&B across various tracks, it was true that the album’s core genre was not easily summarized by anything but the artist’s own name, now essentially a genre unto herself.
The set was clearly an event, and it was received as one. Cowboy Carter bowed atop the Billboard 200 – continuing a streak of every official non-soundtrack LP of Bey’s topping the chart, dating back to her first 2003 solo turn Dangerously in Love – with 407,000 units moved, besting the 332,000 units posted by Renaissance in its first week and still marking the best non-Taylor Swift single-week performance for any 2024 album. What’s more, the set drew near-unanimous acclaim, with a score in the 90s from critic-aggregating website Metacritic, making it easily one of the best-reviewed sets released by any artist this year.
The biggest commercial returns for Cowboy Carter were largely kept to its first few weeks of release, as “Texas Hold ‘Em” began to slide down the Hot 100 after its two weeks on top – and though the set blanketed the chart following its debut, it failed to produce a second enduring chart hit. However, Bey remained present in the pop culture landscape following the album’s release, even officially introducing Team USA during the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies in July (with a pre-filmed bit set to Cowboy’s “Ya Ya”), and appearing in a Levis commercial – soundtracked, of course, by the album’s “Levii’s Jeans” – a couple months later. Even when Beyoncé didn’t appear somewhere, it made headlines, as at April’s Stagecoach Music Festival in California, where rumors flew that Bey would make a surprise cameo to kick off the live element of her Cowboy Carter era – sadly for naught, as the festival weekend came and went without the Queen making an official appearance.
Another arena where Beyoncé’s participation was continually anticipated this year was at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where presidential hopeful Kamala Harris was building excitement over her own somewhat surprise-announced candidacy. Harris used Lemonade’s “Freedom” as one of her campaign anthems, and in late August, reports surfaced that the pop icon would be making an appearance in support of the candidate. That didn’t come to pass, though Bey eventually would appear – alongside Destiny’s Child groupmate and fellow Texan Kelly Rowland – at a Lone Star State rally that October. “I’m not here as a celebrity… I’m not here as a politician,” she proclaimed. “I’m here as a mother. A mother who cares, deeply, about the world my children and all of our children live in… Our moment is right now. It’s time for America to sing a new song.” (Sadly, America ultimately elected to sing the same song as it did in 2016, but given the multitude of A-list endorsements Harris received – including from several other artists on this list – it suggested that the impact pop stars could have on such matters in 2024 was perhaps limited to begin with.)
There was no doubt about the impact that Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter era had on popular music in 2024, however. Even before the LP’s release, in the weeks after the surprise drop of “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” you could already see big bumps for other Black artists in country music – including for eventual Cowboy collaborator Tanner Adell, whose streaming numbers nearly tripled in the days that followed – just based on the conversation that she was creating around the topic. And perhaps the two biggest breakthroughs in country music in 2024 could both be traced back to Bey: Post Malone, who soft-launched his country pivot on “Levii’s Jeans” before going full Nashville with his Hot 100-topping Morgan Wallen single teamup “I Had Some Help” and Billboard 200-topping full album F-1 Trillion, and Shaboozey, who made his Hot 100 bow via two tracks on Cowboy Carter right before besting the chart for a record-tying 19 weeks with his inescapable “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
A full quarter-century after first topping the Hot 100 with “Bills, Bills, Bills” as a member of Destiny’s Child, our editorial staff’s No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of the 21st Century remains not only basically as successful and impactful as she’s ever been, but more adventurous and risk-taking than ever. She is well on her way to being one of the culture-defining superstars of the 2020s, just as she was for the ‘00s and ‘10s; this is her third straight year in our Greatest Pop Stars top 10, with only one other artist (yet to appear on our 2024 rankings) able to boast an active streak as long. She’s not likely to disappear anytime soon, either, as she already has her much-anticipated return to the live stage on the books for halftime of the Houston Texans’ Netflix Christmas game against the Baltimore Ravens, with a possible Cowboy Carter tour expected to follow – and of course, there’s still the perpetually buzzed-about closing act to her archival album trilogy. You can bet that whenever she does plan on dropping that new music, we’ll be staying ready for it.
Check back tomorrow for our Nos. 6 and 5 Greatest Pop Stars, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — having already revealed our Honorable Mentions, our Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all last week, and our No. 10 and No. 9 Greatest Pop Star on Monday. Now, at No. 8, we remember the year in Post Malone — who resumed his old winning ways with a turn towards an entirely new genre.
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When Post Malone rang in 2024 with an appropriately 24-song set at a Las Vegas New Year’s Eve concert, he pulled out his biggest hits – the ones that made him a superstar in the late 2010s by crisscrossing genre lines from hip-hop to rock to pop and beyond – including the Hot 100 No. 1s “Circles,” “Sunflower,” “Rockstar” and “Psycho.” But you had to look beyond the setlist for a forecast of what was to come this year. At Fontainebleau’s BleauLive Theater in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2024, the clearest sign of Post’s creative direction was twofold: his outfit choice of jorts, paired with a tank top, and the red Solo cup that rarely left his hand that night. Yes, Post was about to go country.
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The Texas native had flirted with the genre in the past — making his Country Airplay debut on a posthumous duet version of Joe Diffie’s “Pickup Man” last year and performing the song alongside Morgan Wallen and HARDY at the 2023 CMA Awards. At those awards, Access Hollywood asked backstage if he had his own country project in the works and Post answered, “I think so…yes.”
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The first true hint that said project was actually arriving in 2024 came in February, when Post shared a snippet of a Luke Combs collab that would become “Guy for That.” That was followed by a turn on Beyoncé’s own country project Cowboy Carter in March, with the twangy midtempo duet “Levii’s Jeans,” then a surprise Hank Williams cover at a benefit concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in April. But everything kicked into overdrive later that month at the Stagecoach Music Festival, when – following his own 11-song set of country covers, some including assists from the original artists themselves (Brad Paisley, Dwight Yoakam, Sara Evans) – Post popped back up onstage with headliner Morgan Wallen to debut a brand-new duet called “I Had Some Help.” From fan-shot videos of the Indio, California, performance, it hardly seemed like your typical new-song-at-a-festival response; by the second chorus, the crowd was singing every word as if the track had already been all over country radio.
And then it was. “I Had Some Help” officially arrived on May 10, and that cusp-of-summer release served it well, as the breezy bro duet went on to soundtrack countless pool parties and backyard barbecues, debuting at No. 1 on the Hot 100 in an incredibly crowded pop landscape (Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” were all in the top 10 that week) and holding the top spot for a robust six weeks. It also scored seven weeks at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs and four atop Country Airplay, on its way to being crowned Billboard’s 2024 Song of the Summer in September. The month-plus chart-topper ended a bit of a commercial cold spell for Posty, whose solo No. 1s had all come last decade and who hadn’t found a hit of this size since well before the pandemic.
But “Help” was just the start of Post’s country coup. In June, he announced that his first all-country album F-1 Trillion would arrive in mid-August – and released the second single from the project, a sudsy dive-bar duet with Blake Shelton called “Pour Me a Drink” that would become his second Country Airplay No. 1. In July, he unveiled the full track list, which included a who’s who of honky-tonk heavy-hitters. Only three songs on the 18-track standard album didn’t include features, and it appeared that everyone in Nashville – Dolly Parton, Hank Williams Jr., Tim McGraw, Chris Stapleton and (of course) Jelly Roll – was beyond happy to team up with the congenial hitmaker.
F-1 Trillion debuted atop the Billboard 200 following its Aug. 16 release and spent six weeks at No. 1 on Top Country Albums, with Post landing 18 songs on the Hot 100 from the project during release week. One of the many keys to the project’s colossal success appears to be the way Post fully immersed himself in the country world this year, between performing at both the ACM Awards in May and CMA Awards in November; playing Nashville’s vaunted Bluebird Café in June; and making his Grand Ole Opry debut in August, flanked by Vince Gill, John Michael Montgomery, Lainey Wilson and more country all-stars. He’s been utterly enveloped into what can sometimes be an insular space, proving yet again what a genre chameleon he can be when the musicianship, strong songwriting and love for the craft is so clearly there.
And this could have been a massive year for Post Malone even if he hadn’t successfully ingratiated himself into yet another new genre. Back in February, a day after Taylor Swift had surprise-announced a brand-new album called The Tortured Poets Department, she unveiled the project’s track list – including album opener “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone. It ended up not only being the opening track, but also the lead single, arriving alongside the album on April 19 with a cinematic black-and-white music video starring Swift and a tattoo-free Malone as ex-lovers. Post gushed about the experience on Instagram, writing, “It’s once in a lifetime that someone like @taylorswift comes into this world. I am floored by your heart and your mind, and I am beyond honored to have been asked to help you with your journey.” The song spent two weeks atop the Hot 100, and the duo accepted the video of the year prize together for “Fortnight” at September’s 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, where Malone was Swift’s right-hand man for her latest VMAs victory lap.
Malone’s awards journey might just be getting started too, because in November, he earned seven new Grammy nominations – a tie for the second-most this year – that span both his country album and his collabs with Swift and Beyoncé, and have him in good shape to finally take home his first-ever statue in 17 career tries. Next year will also mark Post’s biggest tour yet: After playing a 21-date mini-tour around F-1 Trillion this fall, the star announced the aptly titled Big Ass Stadium Tour in November, set for next April to July.
Oh, and Post accidentally let a couple of other dates slip when he made the announcement, sharing a poster that included April 13 and 20 stops in Indio, California, with Coachella confirming the next day that Post would be back in the desert to headline alongside Lady Gaga, Green Day and Travis Scott next spring. After 2024 headlining slots at Bonnaroo, Rolling Loud, Governors Ball, Global Citizen Festival and Outside Lands that all skewed heavily toward his earlier, non-country material, it will be interesting to see what kind of similarity the Post Malone who shows up at Coachella will bear to the one who showed up at the same grounds for Stagecoach a year before.
Post Malone isn’t just diversifying when it comes to genre, either; he also made inroads in Hollywood this year, including a bloody boxer role in the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring Road House remake in March and a cheeky cameo as himself in the new Jack Black Christmas movie Dear Santa. In other big accomplishments: His 2018 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse smash “Sunflower” with Swae Lee became the first-ever double-diamond single in RIAA history in February, meaning it’s reached an equivalent of 20 million sales; that same month, he performed “America the Beautiful” ahead of the 2024 Super Bowl, which reached a record 123.7 million viewers; and he came face-to-face with his very own wax figure backstage at Gov Ball in June (even mistaking it for a real person).
As Malone wraps his epic year by dotting 2024 best-of lists (including both our best albums and best songs staff rankings), his country project ends on a high, celebrating platinum certification from the RIAA for F-1 Trillion and five-times platinum status for “I Had Some Help,” as of Dec. 12. It once again seems like everything he touches turns to gold (or, really, platinum), so as Post’s 2024 turns to his 2025, keep your eyes peeled for any wardrobe clues that might signal which part of the top 40 world he has his sights on taking over next.
Check back later today for the reveal of our No. 7 Greatest Pop Star, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — having already revealed our Honorable Mentions, our Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all last week, and our No. 10 Greatest Pop Star earlier today. Now, at No. 9, we remember the year in Billie Eilish — who continued one of the great pop star runs of the past decade with a year that felt like her really coming into her own in particularly new and rewarding ways.
By January 2024, Billie Eilish had already accomplished more in roughly five years than most pop stars do in a lifetime. The numbers spoke for themselves; since her breakthrough in 2019, the singer accrued 7 Grammys, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a No. 1 single alongside four other top 10 hits on the Hot 100, two No. 1 debuts on the Billboard 200 and a sold-out arena tour. By practically every metric, Eilish had more than earned her place in the pantheon of modern pop greats.
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Where others might have rested on their laurels, Eilish spent her 2024 cementing her status as a leading artist of her generation while creating her own version of pop stardom. The scrappy, goth-core teenager who took over the world in 2019 was gone, replaced by a young woman finally starting to find her footing in a turbulent world.
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It helped that the start of her year saw spillover success from an otherwise-quiet 2023. Even in an off-cycle year, the singer-songwriter unleashed the languishing ballad “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie soundtrack, capturing a world-worn sense of ennui that could have easily eluded a 21-year-old pop singer-songwriter. For her existentialist efforts, Eilish was rewarded, taking home two more Grammys, a Golden Globe and an Oscar in 2024, breaking new records with each respective award.
But Eilish had no intention to spend her 2024 victory-lapping. After spending the better part of two years battling writer’s block with her collaborator and big brother Finneas, Eilish found her sound — not quite the brooding alt-pop experimentation of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, nor the melodic, torch-bearing introspection of Happier Than Ever, but a nebulous middle ground between the two — and announced the impending release Hit Me Hard and Soft in April. There would be no singles, no previews, no teases: As she told Rolling Stone, “every single time an artist I love puts out a single without the context of the album, I’m just already prone to hating on it.” Instead, she insisted, the fans would just have to wait and listen.
It was clear from that first listen that Eilish’s subversive strategy was paying off. While critics praised both of the singer’s previous LPs for their emotional frankness, Hit Me landed haymakers of honesty across each of its 10 tracks, as Eilish dissected body dysmorphia (“Skinny”), disconnection (“Chihiro”), unreciprocated affection (“The Greatest”) and the obsessive attention of fans (“The Diner”) — all topics she’d touched on before, but never with this level of in-depth self-awareness. Meanwhile, Finneas’ production took everything that worked on her last two projects, blended it all together and added in new shades to create an isolated sonic universe for Hit Me to occupy. There’s a reason both Billie and Finneas compared her album to Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die and Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory — Hit Me Hard and Soft was, in fact, an “album-ass album.”
From the word go, it became readily apparent that the album hit hard, not soft, with fans. For the first time in her career, Eilish debuted every song from the album on the Hot 100, all of them within the chart’s top 40. She also sold a career-high 339,000 units in one week. Yes, Hit Me did become her first album not to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — but when you consider her competition was Taylor Swift’s monolithic The Tortured Poets Department, still selling 378,000 units in its fifth of 17 total weeks (and counting) atop the chart so far, it becomes clear how huge Hit Me Hard and Soft truly was.
One of the biggest stories to come out of the album’s release week, though, was the official first single announced after its release — the sexy, sapphic “Lunch.” Bearing a similar sonic bravado to her lone Hot 100 No. 1 hit “Bad Guy,” the song’s sweltering bassline kicks up under Eilish’s casually confident croon, as she opines about the pleasures of … well, pleasure. “I could eat that girl for lunch/ Yeah, she dances on my tongue/ Tastes like she might be the one,” she winks on the track. After a rocky coming out in late 2023, here was Eilish taking control of the narrative, setting the record straight (well, you get it) and saying exactly how she felt about the women around her. Plus, the fans were clearly eating “Lunch” up — the song bowed at No. 5 on the Hot 100, the highest debut on the chart in Eilish’s career.
It wouldn’t be the last time Eilish waxed poetic about the art of femme-focused seduction in 2024 either — months later, on a blockbuster remix of Charli XCX’s Brat deluxe track “Guess,” Eilish would double down as she complimented her love interest’s underwear, before slyly looking to her collaborator: “Charli likes boys, but she knows I’d hit it.” Both “Lunch” and “Guess” became key fixtures in what observers referred to as the sapphic pop renaissance of the summer, where women singing about their love for women took over the cultural conversation. As artists like Chappell Roan and Reneé Rapp dominated the festival circuit, Eilish’s odes to flirtation and feasting flitted around the Hot 100’s top 40.
Yet the great benefit of Eilish’s release strategy had yet to fully pay off. As “Lunch” and most of the rest of Hit Me’s songs moved down the charts in the weeks following their release, one song began to slowly glide up the charts. It wasn’t ambient, slap-bass featuring “Chihiro,” the song Eilish had filmed a music video for and signaled as her followup single — rather, the lovestruck, ‘80s-tinged “Birds of a Feather” emerged from the nest, gradually soaring up the Hot 100.
“Birds,” by almost every measure, is unlike other Billie Eilish songs. Over plinking synths and low-key acoustic guitar strums, a smitten Eilish sings about an uncomplicated, eternal kind of love — the kind of love that, in so many of her other songs, had notably eluded her. Gone are the sneaky, off-kilter production tricks from breakout When We All Fall Asleep, now replaced by a simple melody. Even Billie’s vocals evolve throughout the song; her signature airy head-voice shifts down into a stunning, full-throated belt by the song’s conclusion.
Perhaps that’s why fans became so enamored with the track. The song quickly found an audience on TikTok, soundtracking thousands of videos celebrating users’ friendships and relationships, as Eilish’s voice promised that she couldn’t “change the weather,” but that “if it’s forever, it’s even better.” Even though the track wasn’t necessarily intended to be a single, the fans had spoken: by July, the label had officially serviced the the track to radio as the album’s second official single. “Birds” quickly rose to No. 1 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in August, where it’s ruled for a combined 18 weeks and counting. After giving a beachside performance of the song for the Olympic handover celebration in August, the song continued climbing up the Pop Airplay chart until it reached No. 1 in September, where it earned an eight-week stay at the summit. After the release of the track’s paranormal video at the end of September, “Birds” reached No. 2 on the Hot 100, become one of Eilish’s career-defining hits.
It’s fitting that Eilish earned her latest breakout track without meaning to – that seemed to be her standard mode of operations over the last year. The singer had insisted since her breakthrough that she had zero interest in being a role model for her fans — after all, she was still figuring out how to live her life, how could she be expected to show others how to live theirs? Even this year, she continued to point out that she will not be the new poster child for mental health issues or queer identity (both more than fair decisions on her part, considering both issues are intrinsic to her private life).
But Eilish did spend much of 2024 making good use of her platform to try and leave the world a better place than she found it. Where the music industry has been found to be extremely lacking on environmental issues, Eilish spoke up about how she and her team placed sustainability at the forefront of her career. The singer called out the industry standard of releasing multiple vinyl variants to drive sales as “so wasteful,” especially with the lack of using recycled materials when it comes to vinyl. When the 2024 presidential election rolled around, Eilish threw her weight behind Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, praising her advocacy not only for the environment, but for women’s issues, LGBTQ+ rights and more.
Even as December rolls around, Eilish is still reaping the rewards of her big year. A July performance of her song “Wildflower” sprouted up all over TikTok, sending the song back into the top 40 before falling off for the holiday season. The album — which remains in the Billboard 200’s top 10 six months after its release — also earned Eilish a massive 7 Grammy nominations for 2025, including album of the year.
Yet for all of her massive career wins in 2024, it’s her personal journey to self-discovery this year that might best reflect Eilish’s place in our current pop culture discourse. For the first time since she blasted into the public eye as the chaotic, feisty, goth girl next door, the singer-songwriter seems to have found the lane that she is most comfortable in — one where she’s not limited by the perceptions put upon her by anyone other than herself. In the choose-your-own-adventure book that is the modern music industry, Billie Eilish finally seems to have found a storyline of pop stardom that she can work best with; it just so happens that she wrote this one herself.
Check back tomorrow for our Nos. 8 and 7 Greatest Pop Stars, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — having already revealed our Honorable Mentions, our Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all last week. Now, at No. 10, we remember the year in Jelly Roll — a late-blooming country superstar whose compelling hits, winning personality and relatable story helped him become one of the most unavoidable artists of 2024.
When he wasn’t taking his now-famous daily cold plunge in an ice bath, Jelly Roll was everywhere in 2024.
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Even if you can’t hum “I Am Not Okay,” which reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was the closest Jelly Roll got to a pure pop hit this year, you’re still likely aware of the gregarious rapper-turned-country artist through his sheer ubiquity. Jelly Roll, who turned 40 on Dec. 4, performed on no fewer than 10 collaborations from across the musical spectrum in 2024, alongside the wide-ranging likes of Eminem, Falling in Reverse, Jessie Murph, OneRepublic, Machine Gun Kelly, Halsey, Post Malone, Dustin Lynch and Brooks & Dunn. He also landed three No. 1 songs on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart for the second year in a row, and topped both the Hard Rock Songs and Mainstream Rock Airplay charts.
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Here’s what it was like to be Jelly Roll in 2024: During one weekend in early February, he paid tribute to Bon Jovi at the 33rd annual MusiCares Person of the Year gala, followed by performing at the illustrious pre-Grammy gala hosted by Clive Davis the next night. And then to cap off the weekend, he also sang at the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for two trophies and met his longtime crush, Taylor Swift.
Or fast forward to September, where in one four-day span he played his first-ever (sold-out) show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The next day he headlined the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park in the afternoon and was the musical guest on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. Then two nights later, he not only performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, but he also got coveted couch time on the late night show, an indicator of his celebrity status.
Jelly Roll scored wins across the board as an entertainer in 2024. He may not have taken home any Grammys in February (he’ll get more chances in 2025 after being nominated for two Grammys in November), but the 2024 People’s Choice Awards named him male country artist of the year in February. In April, he snagged both best new artist (pop) and best new artist (country) at the iHeart Awards, and in April, he was the big winner at the CMT Music Awards, winning all three awards he was nominated for, including video of the year (“Need a Favor”)
The winning streak continued in May, two weeks after he had played Stagecoach for the first time (and paid tribute to Toby Keith by performing “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” with T-Pain), when he took home music event of the year for “Save Me” with Lainey Wilson at the ACM Awards. “This song saved me,” he said during his acceptance speech, which reflected his painful past. “I was in a dark place. I thought I would die and go to jail, and I’m standing here today an ACM Awards winner.”
He also won on the health front, losing 100 pounds in a journey he documented on social media (including the daily plunges), and undergoing major dental surgery. It felt like everything he did – no matter how large or small — made the news, from testifying before a Senate committee on the fentanyl crisis and revealing that he and wife Bunnie XO were trying to expand their family via IVF to announcing he regretted getting most of his plentiful tattoos or surprising kids running a lemonade stand with a $700 donation.
He also made musical strides on both the large and small screens, contributing “Dead End Road” to the Twisters: The Album and “Run It” as the only original song in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the third installment of the popular franchise. Meanwhile, new song “Get By” became the ESPN college football anthem for the 2024-25 anthem and “Dead End Road” and “Liar” served as the official theme songs for the WWE SummerSlam, with Jelly performing the atter at the event.
When it seemed like it couldn’t get better, Jelly Roll performed with his hero, Eminem in June at Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central. They sang “Sing for the Moment,” and a month later, Jelly Roll appeared on “Somebody Save Me” on Eminem’s The Death of Slim Shady album.In September, he joined Eminem (via projection) to help open the VMA Awards when the rapper performed a medley of “Houdini” and “Somebody Save Me.”
On Aug. 27 in Salt Lake City, Jelly Roll kicked off his first headlining arena tour. The Beautifully Broken show was part concert/part gospel revival and fully sold out. The tour perfectly set up the Oct. 11 release of his album of the same name, the follow up to 2023’s Whitsitt Chapel, which came out through a new partnership between BMG and Republic. Like its predecessor, the set examined issues close to his heart, including addiction and mental health, that resonated with his growing millions of fans. His hard work paid off: Jelly Roll landed his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 and Top Country Albums, with sales of 161,000 units sold moved in its debut week,, according to Luminate.
Two nights before Thanksgiving, Jelly Roll wrapped his tour, which grossed $79.3 million and sold 685,000 tickets over 56 shows, according to Billboard Boxscore. Without even pausing to indulge in some turkey, two days later, Jelly Roll crashed Lainey Wilson’s halftime performance at the Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving, for a powerful take on their Country Airplay-topping duet, “Save Me.”
Just as he was seemingly everywhere, Jelly Roll and his music were seemingly for everyone — especially anyone who has ever felt alone or desperate and yearning for redemption. Even The Rock declared that Jelly Roll’s music had helped him through rough times. Though his upbeat demeanor shone through every viral interaction, Jelly Roll’s music was still infused with a questioning darkness that lingers from his teens and 20s spent incarcerated and his 30s struggling to break through musically. But far from being depressing, it’s music that looks at frailties and imperfections not as weaknesses, but part of what makes us gloriously human and unites us.
Though it hardly feels possible, next year seems like it could get even bigger for the country superstar, as he ascends to festival headliner and stadium tour status. Already on the books: he will headline Stagecoach in April and then head out on The Big Ass Stadium Tour with Post Malone. In other words, look for Jelly to keep on rolling in 2025.
Check back for our No. 9 artist, to be revealed later today, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!
We’re done recapping the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century — find all of our past episodes for that series here — but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still plenty of Greatest Pop Stars Podcast discussion to be had, as we begin to dive into our annual top 10 Greatest Pop Stars of the […]
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all next week. Before that, we revealed our Honorable Mentions for 2024 on Tuesday and our Comeback of the Year earlier today. Now, we present a salute to the artist to the artist who crashed the mainstream for the first time in the biggest way this year: country singer-songwriter Shaboozey, who seized the spotlight from one of the most crowded pop classes in modern pop history and etched his name into the Billboard record books.
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Can’t say he didn’t call it. Shaboozey’s 2024 album Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going essentially predicted in its title that after a near-decade of struggling to properly break through in the music industry, the hybrid country singer-songwriter was headed for different heights this year. And sure enough, by the end of the calendar, he had one of the biggest Billboard Hot 100 hits of all time, nominations and/or appearances at pretty much every award show you could think of, and the whole world knowing (and sometimes making uncomfortable jokes about) his name. “We in the club now,” he summarized his year to Billboard for his cover story in October – and like his album title, it was true on multiple levels.
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Of course by the time of Where I’ve Been’s May release, Shaboozey already had major reason to suspect that 2024 would not be like other years of his career. First, he’d made two appearances on one of the year’s biggest releases, by the Billboard staff’s recently named Greatest Pop Star of the 21st Century. Beyoncé’s country- and Americana-exploring Cowboy Carter had a loaded guest list, including contemporary hitmakers like Post Malone and Miley Cyrus and genre legends like Dolly Parton and Linda Martell, but the only artist to show up on two (non-interlude) songs on the set was Shaboozey. He was initially invited just to write on the set, before the Queen asked him to also provide vocals on its “Spaghettii” and “Sweet * Honey * Buckiin,” which became the first two Hot 100 hits of his career that April, reaching No. 31 and No. 61, respectively.
He would reach much greater heights on the chart with his next release. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” arrived on April 12, just two weeks after his Beyoncé bow, with his team intentionally pushing up the release of the new song to capitalize on the momentum of Cowboy Carter – which, in addition to its spotlighting of Shaboozey, also helped create a conversation around Black artists in country music, and even offered a streaming bump to some of those newer artists featured on it. In fact, Shaboozey’s team says that it was an early-2024 pre-release performance of “A Bar Song” in California – which was so well received that he ran it back a second time later in the show – that had convinced Ricky Lawson, an A&R on Team Bey who was in attendance, that the ascendant singer-songwriter should be invited to the project in the first place.
The timing was certainly right for “A Bar Song,” a drink-your-cares-away hoot-along with irresistibly celebratory lyrics, but also just enough melancholy in its capo’d acoustic guitar hook and wailing strings – and profound exhaustion (“Why the hell do I work so hard?”) in its verses – to give the song real emotional heft. The single’s not-so-secret weapon came from an inspired lift of the count-off lyrics and shoutable refrain to rapper J-Kwon’s 2004 crossover smash “Tipsy” – hence the parenthetical – which anchored the song in pop and hip-hop history without overplaying its hand or feeling cheap. The final result landed somewhere in between Zach Bryan and the Black Eyed Peas, and was an immediate success, debuting at No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100, Shaboozey’s first unaccompanied entry as a lead artist.
The next month, the full Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going followed. Released on independent label EMPIRE, the tight 12-track set presented Shaboozey as a core country artist who was also very well-versed in rock, pop, folk and hip-hop. He sounded as comfortable on the LP doing emotional vocal runs up and down the octave alongside top 40 hitmaker Noah Cyrus on the Kacey Musgraves-like “My Fault” as he did getting faded alongside rising trap star BigXthaPlug on the booming “Drink Don’t Need No Mix,” and the entire set felt as purposeful as its title. Where I’ve Been scored an eye-opening No. 5 debut on the Billboard 200 albums chart, and received uniformly strong reviews from critics, ultimately finishing in the top 20 on the Billboard staff’s list of the year’s best albums.
Before the debut of Where I’ve Been, “A Bar Song” had climbed into the top five of the Hot 100, and Shaboozey was starting to bring the song to platforms across the cultural landscape: CMA Fest, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the From the Block web series. His most interesting appearance that summer came at June’s BET Awards, where he performed his new smash and even welcomed a special guest turn from J-Kwon towards the song’s end. Country performances had been exceptionally rare at Culture’s Biggest Night, but Shaboozey commanded the stage and won new fans in the likes of Quavo and French Montana, who the artist told Billboard gave him shouts following the performance. (“I love hip-hop; I’m a part of their community, too,” he said in the cover story.)
By July, in its 12th week on the chart, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” had finally reached the top spot on the Hot 100. The ear-catching song – which also ruled the Shazam charts for months, as a classic “wait, what is this?” jam to the unfamiliar – had been an instant hit on streaming and even in digital sales, but had taken a little longer to catch on radio. Once it did, though, the airwaves couldn’t get enough, as the song ultimately topped Billboard’s Country Airplay, Pop Airplay and Adult Pop Airplay listings – and even made a quick cameo on R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay – while topping the all-format Radio Songs for the first time in early August, and subsequently dominating it all the way through to December.
As the song continued to rule the charts, stretching its Hot 100 reign to double-digit weeks as autumn began, it also began to collect accolades. It got nominated for single of the year at the CMA Awards, while Shaboozey himself picked up a nod for best new artist. But he lost in both categories at the November ceremonies, while his stage name – which was already a spin off the way teachers would misspell his real last name, Chibueze – found itself at the center of ba-dum-ching quips made by the hosts and award-winners all night, increasing the feeling of othering for a guy whose insider acceptance in Nashville had already seemed a little touch-and-go. By then, he at least had consolation in the form of five Grammy nominations, including best new artist and song of the year for “Bar Song.”
And in November, the Hot 100 reign of Shaboozey’s breakout hit turned from jaw-dropping to downright historic. Despite brief interruptions to its run from Kendrick Lamar and Morgan Wallen, “A Bar Song” had held proven magnetic to the top of the Hot 100, and on the chart dated Nov. 30, it ruled for a 19th non-consecutive week – tying the all-time record set a half decade earlier by another artist mixing country, pop and hip-hop in Lil Nas X, with his Billy Ray Cyrus-featuring “Old Town Road.” By then, Shaboozey also had a new single: “Good News,” a slightly more dejected-sounding spin on the end-of-the-work-week anthem form he’d perfected with “Bar Song,” which also debuted at No. 71 on the chart. In early December, he brought both singles to his first performance on Saturday Night Live, with the two songs shooting to the top two of the iTunes real-time chart shortly after – suggesting he may have another big hit on his hands in 2025.
Whether or not “Good News” immediately deads the “one-hit wonder” talk or it takes him a little longer to get out from underneath the shadow of one of the biggest hits in Billboard chart history, Shaboozey is here now, and he’s proven that he’s got the talent, the drive and the songs to stick around – and maybe even continue to grow. For his own part, he sees “A Bar Song” not as an albatross to be shed, but simply as a door-opener taking the heat off him moving forward.
“I feel like I can really get out there and start making music without pressure,” he told Billboard in November following his Grammy nominations. “A lot of people work to get a No. 1 song. Being able to knock that out at this point in my career, I can start focusing on making the music that really matters to me.” Where he is isn’t where he’s been, but where he’s going from here could be absolutely anywhere.
Listen to our Greatest Pop Stars podcast tomorrow, as we recap our 2024 Honorable Mentions, Rookie and Comeback of the Year — and check back next Monday as we get our top 10 countdown underway!
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2024 all next week. Before that, we revealed our Honorable Mentions for 2024 on Tuesday — and now, we present a salute to the artist with the most impressive comeback this year: Irish singer-songwriter Hozier, who took his slowly built cult stardom back overground with one of the year’s defining pop hits and his biggest year of touring and live appearances yet.
Hozier — yes, the guy that sent a soulful rock ballad about a romantic relationship thriving in the face of religious discrimination to No. 2 on the Hot 100 back in 2014 — could have made 2024 a well-deserved victory lap after dropping a chart-topping album and embarking on a packed arena tour in 2023. Instead, he spent 2024 securing a commercial re-peak that he earned by spending the past decade growing his cult fanbase, even without further post-“Church” crossover success.
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At the top of the year, all was well with Hozier and his fans. Unreal Unearth was a smashing success — topping three genre charts (folk, rock and alternative), reaching No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and spawning his first Hot 100 entry in nearly a decade (“Eat Your Young,” No. 67) — but there was the pesky issue of the Grammys. He’s never been a Recording Academy darling (his sole nod was in song of the year for “Take Me to Church” back in 2015), but a complete shutout for Unreal Unearth and its singles despite formidable commercial success and critical acclaim felt particularly painful.
Nonetheless, Hozier & Co. barreled onwards. After spending most of 2023 touring the U.S. and Europe, Hozier added over 50 new shows across North America, alongside headlining slots at several music festivals, including Boston Calling, Hinterland, and Railbird. From the intimacy of his most heart-wrenching ballads (“Cherry Wine”) to the arena-rocking riffs of his most vibrant bangers (both parts of “De Selby”), Hozier’s engaging stage show reminded longtime fans why they first fell in love with him and converted legions of new fans to his kingdom.
As his tour captivated multiple continents, footage from his shows helped Hozier pick up a devoted TikTok fan base who turned him into something of a heartthrob. They were enamored by his vulnerability, long flowing hair and signature “growl”; Hozier had entered his “Forest Daddy” era, and the world was thirsty for whatever that entailed. His newer TikTok audience was also drawn to his brand of folksy alt-rock that had a resurgence over the pandemic and the years immediately following, perhaps best exemplified by the breakout success of Noah Kahan. At the end of 2023, Hozier and Kahan joined forces for a duet version of the latter’s “Northern Attitude,” earning the Irish rocker his first top 40 appearance since “Church” and setting the stage for his 2024 commercial comeback. That level of fanbase-priming all helped result in the eye-popping streaming and sales debut of “Too Sweet,” the song that cemented Hozier’s mainstream commercial resurgence.
Hozier first teased Unheard as a standalone EP comprised of songs that did not make the final Unreal Unearth tracklist. In his TikTok announcing the project, the Irish singer-songwriter used a snippet of “Too Sweet,” setting the stage for the song’s official TikTok sound to collect over 42,000 posts on the platform. “Too Sweet” debuted at No. 5 on the Hot 100 (dated April 6), marking both Hozier’s first song to debut in the top 10 and his first top 10 hit since “Take Me to Church.” Three weeks later — thanks to over 35.6 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate – the sultry pop-rock tune reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 (dated April 27), marking his first U.S. chart-topper. Though “Too Sweet” only topped the Hot 100 for one frame, it managed to do so in a week where he was competing with singles from longtime stars Beyoncé and Ariana Grande, as well as historic pop breakthroughs for Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, and Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song.”
Hozier’s “Sweet” success wasn’t just a well-deserved celebratory moment following his robust 2023, it was also a feat that culturally positioned him as one of the sonic forefathers of Top 40’s larger alt-rock resurgence in 2024. Notes of Hozier’s brand of big-voiced, guitar-backed rock anthems with a pop edge can be found in a number of 2024 Hot 100 hits, including Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” (No. 1), Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” (No. 2), Myles Smith’s “Stargazing” (No. 20) and Michael Marcagi’s “Scared to Start” (No. 54), and, of course, Kahan’s “Stick Season” (No. 9). All of those artists made their Hot 100 debuts this decade, but Hozier has been riding this formula to hits for a decade now – it was only right he finally got a chart-topper of his own.
Now his longest-running Hot 100 hit behind “Church” (37 weeks), “Too Sweet” topped three Billboard airplay rankings (pop, rock and adult pop) and became his first song to top Streaming Songs and the all-genre Radio Songs chart. What’s most remarkable about “Too Sweet,” is how little in-your-face promotion the song required to connect with consumers: All Hozier really needed was a good song and a TikTok post – no dance trend or star-studded remix or virality-seeking music video necessary.
A few months after “Too Sweet” hit the Hot 100’s summit, Hozier headlined the first night of Lollapalooza 2024 (Aug. 1). During his set – in which he debuted “Nobody’s Soldier” – the routinely outspoken artist called for “peace and safety and security for everybody in the Middle East… which of course would mean seeing Palestine free from occupation and free from violence.” In an era where many of music’s biggest stars have seemingly forgotten or undervalue the edifying, unifying and liberating aspects of the artform, it was incredibly refreshing to hear Hozier wax poetic about the innate interconnectedness of global liberation movements at his shows around the world.
Unaired arrived a little over two weeks after Hozier’s headlining set (Aug. 16), with “Nobody’s Soldier” serving as the focus track. Following the uptempo blueprint of “Too Sweet,” “Soldier” missed the Hot 100 entirely, but still managed to become Hozier’s fifth consecutive No. 1 single at Adult Alternative Airplay (AAA). With “Soldier,” “Sweet” and his Kahan-assisted “Northern Attitude,” Hozier became the first soloist in history to score three new AAA No. 1s in a single year – and he’s just one song away from tying U2 for the all-time record of most consecutive AAA chart-toppers (six).
By the end of the year, Hozier combined his two new EPs into one sprawling deluxe album titled Unreal Unearth: Unending. To cap off his 2024, Hozier will perform as the musical guest for the upcoming Dec. 21 episode of Saturday Night Live – his first appearance on the show since post-“Church” in 2014.
It’s not often that an undeniable commercial resurgence occurs alongside a revival in cultural prominence, but Hozier pulled it off this year. With “Too Sweet” Hozier placed himself at the center of one 2024’s defining musical styles and returned to the awards conversation, picking up his first two MTV Video Music Awards nods in 10 years – though that Grammy remains out of reach, as he was shut out again in the 2025 nominations. Not only did he top the pop charts with new solo music, but he also re-established himself as a bona fide superstar. Whether he was flexing onstage banter or speaking truth to power, people hung on to his every word – especially the non-musical ones.
Few could have predicted that Hozier would score a No. 1 single a decade after his “Take Me to Church” breakthrough, but, then again, few expected “Church” to be as massive as it was a decade ago. If ever there was a shining contemporary example of a mainstream musician consistently serving and nurturing their fan base, and reaping handsome (if long-delayed) returns for those efforts, it’s Hozier.
Check Billboard later today for the reveal of our 2024 Rookie of the Year, and come back next week as we start the countdown of our top 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024!
12/10/2024
Our editorial staff’s 2024 list of the Greatest Pop Stars from the year that was gets underway with the 10 artists who just missed the cut.
12/10/2024