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. 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