Greatest Pop Stars of 21st Century

With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. You can see the stars who have made our list so far here — and now, we examine the century in Britney Spears, a pop force whose dominance over Millennial culture earned her the title as Princess of Pop for her signature vocal tone, hit catalog and show-stopping performances. (Hear more discussion of Britney Spears and explanation of her list ranking on our Greatest Pop Stars podcast tomorrow (Oct. 30).)

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Few came, saw, and conquered global superstardom quite like Britney Spears. At the turn of the millennium, the teen queen captured the hearts of millions with her pop hits — and, unknowingly, set a business model that would carry for decades to come. But even when record labels tried to replicate the magic, they fell short, because it was largely Spears incorporating her creativity and personality into her career that made the Mississippi-born talent such a unique force. As the calendar changed centuries, no one held a tighter grip on pop’s new golden age than Britney, who became an icon with a reliable talent for creating zeitgeist-y moments — years before social media even existed. 

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While Spears’ celebrity and artistry recalled pop juggernauts Madonna and Janet Jackson, she was more reserved in relation to the limelight and never fully leaned into her fierce cultural impact. While some of her predecessors purposely aimed to bust down societal doors, Spears just wanted to excel as a pop star. She led with Southern charm and understated humility, and that juxtaposition added something special to her star power as it ascended (and sometimes tumbled) through the 2000s and into the 2010s, remaining squarely in the public consciousness to this day.

Britney Spears

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Britney Spears

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Ironically, there was once a time when Spears’ endurance was up for debate, with comparisons to flash-in-the-pan pop stars of yesteryear. But really, we should’ve known from her first single that she was here to stay. The release of her debut single “…Baby One More Time” in late 1998 marked a cultural reset, jump-starting a reign that enthralled fans, initially shocked parents and forced the industry to follow her lead. With Swedish producer Max Martin at the helm, the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — due, of course, in no small part to the accompanying high school-set music video (which, to the singer’s credit, was all her idea, coming after she rejected a video treatment that was much more convoluted). 

At just 16, it was a long time coming for Spears, whose experience and professionalism spanned pageants, gymnastics and a stint on Disney’s All-New Mickey Mouse Club. For the rest of us, it felt instantaneous, with her accompanying album of the same name dropping months later. Coming on the heels of debuts by the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, the LP brought the burgeoning TRL era of pop music to new heights and became the best-selling debut by a female teenage artist, moving over 14 million copies in the United States. With her growing arsenal of polished pop hits, dance-heavy music videos and girl-next-door persona, Spears set the stage for an even bigger splash at the beginning of the 21st century. (Britney’s ‘90s accomplishments were not factored into the Billboard staff’s calculations when determining her ranking on this solely 21st century-based list.) 

Spears’ 2000 sophomore LP Oops!…I Did It Again reunited the star with Max Martin, while bringing in veteran hitmakers Rodney Jerkins and Diane Warren for the “more mature” new effort — an arguable assessment, but the 17-year-old knew how to strike a chord with her fans: After all, she was already on a first-name basis with them. In April 2000, she returned with the ultimate friend zone anthem in the set’s title track, decked out in a cherry red catsuit for the now-iconic music video. Its parent album stormed the Billboard 200 upon its release a month later, selling a staggering 1.319 million copies in its first week — at the time garnering the largest first-week sales ever for an album by a female artist.

If critics dismissed her artistry due to her flashy showmanship and sex appeal, it was that very stage prowess that set her apart. Later that year, she hit the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards to perform a medley of “Oops” and a cover of The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” In three minutes, she managed a whole career pivot, tearing off a black suit to reveal a little sparkly ensemble — giving new meaning to being “not that innocent.” The media further vilified her for the performance, but it also set high expectations for what women (and Britney herself) could do in pop music. It was also one of the few windows in her career where she tried to strike a balance between live singing and the athleticism of her choreography as future performances would be mostly lip-synced, with Britney focusing on the physicality of her dancing.

With so much access to celebrity nowadays, it’s hard to fully understand the phenomenon that was Britney Spears at her commercial peak, but she was everywhere — dominating award shows, gracing magazine covers, starring in TV commercials, available for purchase as a Barbie doll and, of course, on the tip of everyone’s tongue. She was the pop princess for a new generation, at once sex-positive but demure, and arm-in-denim-arm with *NSYNC’s Justin Timberlake, the pair making for Y2K music’s ultimate power couple. While she supported her fellow women in pop and minded her business, the teen queen had some people angry, and others excessively inquisitive, a misogyny-laced treatment that would only get its proper reckoning years down the line. From intrusive questions about her virginity to men twice her age discounting her work, she remained mostly posed and polite until her next studio offering: 2001’s Britney.

Spears upped the ante for her third album, stepping to the plate as a young woman who unapologetically owned her sexuality. With a backbone provided by hip-hop superproducers The Neptunes, the set’s slinky lead single, “I’m a Slave 4 U,” served as a radical sonic shift for the star. She was still months away from her 20s, but the transition from teen sensation to adult superstar was met with criticism. Yet the song became another vehicle for her to shine on stage — and at the 2001 VMAs, she draped herself in a seven-foot python and churned out her most unforgettable performance to date. While she played up the role of sex kitten, the accompanying project, which continued her No. 1 streak on the Billboard 200, also captured her exploration of womanhood (“Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman”), yearned for the normalcy of an average life (“Overprotected”) and channeled her inner Janet Jackson (“Boys”). 

Those follow-up singles failed to make the same impact as her former releases, possibly due to a rumored radio suppression, reportedly demoting the songs from high rotation. But by then, Spears had something else to focus on: her foray into Hollywood with her debut feature film, Crossroads. The coming-of-age story boasted a noteworthy ensemble, including Zoe Saldaña, Taryn Manning and Kim Cattrall, with Shonda Rhimes debuting her first screenplay — but despite Spears’ affable charm translating well to the silver screen, the movie didn’t hit the mark with critics. Simultaneously, her culture-dominating romance with Timberlake came to an end after three years, with the heartthrob reportedly ending the relationship via text message. With their split, the tabloids took sides, as rumors of infidelity spread concerning Spears and their joint choreographer Wade Robson, and Timberlake fueled the flames while launching his own solo career – particularly with his second solo single, the No. 3 Hot 100 smash “Cry Me a River,” which included a Britney lookalike in its video. 

It was clear that Spears needed some time away from the limelight, but before the end of 2002, she called off her planned six-month hiatus and started work on her most liberating album to that point, In the Zone. That set was also preceded by a new wave of headlines, courtesy of another steamy VMA performance – this time finding her lip locking with her idol, Madonna. The lightning-in-a-bottle moment prompted international headlines and downright hysteria: It was actually pretty tame by today’s standards, but those few seconds, complemented by cameras panning to a stone-faced Timberlake, rocked the world. In what could be perceived as the passing of the torch, Spears also recruited Madge for the frisky “Me Against the Music,” the album’s lead single, which was highly-anticipated and well received by fans, but failed to end her commercial dry spell, peaking at No. 35 on the Hot 100. 

Released a month after “Music,” Zone dabbled in hip-hop (“Outrageous”), pulsating euro-pop (“Breathe on Me”) and delicate slow songs (“Everytime,” soon to become her signature ballad). Most importantly, tucked six tracks deep on the album was “Toxic,” a theatrical dance-pop track with producers Bloodshy & Avant, led by a thick guitar line and Bollywood strings sample. Spears reportedly fought with her label to release the track as the album’s second single in early 2004 — and in the end, her vision paid off. The hit reached No. 9 on the Hot 100 and won best dance recording at the 2004 Grammys, marking her first (and to date only) win. It remains perhaps the most critically acclaimed three minutes and eighteen seconds of Britney’s career, and was ranked earlier this year as the Billboard staff’s No. 1 song of 2004. The companion video saw secret agent Spears dress as a stewardess, slither around in nothing but diamonds and poison her boyfriend, quickly becoming one of her most beloved visuals. 

At a time when it wasn’t cool to like Britney, “Toxic” shifted that narrative. Even though the world still regarded her and pop idol counterparts as record label puppets, she was nothing close to it — calling the shots on single releases and collaborators, and pushing back on the head honcho executives several times during this campaign. She ran with that agency and never looked back. Behind closed doors, though, things were starting to unravel. An impromptu visit to Las Vegas to marry her childhood friend Jason Allen Alexander caused concern. The union was annulled 55 hours afterward. Then, the overworked star suffered a leg injury while filming the video for “Outrageous” during a rare break in between dates of her “Onyx Hotel World Tour,” forcing her to cancel the rest of the trek and altering her performance ability forever.

Britney Spears

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The next few years for Spears were, well, chaotic, to say the least. Her romance with backup dancer-turned-husband Kevin Federline (and their subsequent reality show together) was heating up and the star shifted her perspective. The gloves were off and she was going to do as she pleased, both personally and professionally. Though she never earned the public’s stamp of approval for the relationship, Miss American Dream found ways of owning her decisions and clapping back with her music. A cover of Bobby Brown’s 1988 hit, “My Prerogative,” fronted her first compilation: 2004’s Greatest Hits: My Prerogative, while the eerie “Mona Lisa” foreshadowed her looming troubles. With only hours left until 2005, she dropped by Los Angeles’ KIIS-FM unexpectedly to preview the track, revealing it to be part of a project titled The Original Doll. 

For the next few years, career priorities would take a backseat as she and Federline welcomed two children, Sean Preston and Jayden James — but the unrelenting attention of the paparazzi increased and the star became the go-to cover girl for tabloid culture. Juggling motherhood, laying the groundwork for her next album and an eventual divorce from K-Fed put her at the eye of the gossip media storm, helping fuel the rise of outlets like Perez Hilton, TMZ and X17. Embarrassing and intrusive coverage of her led to headlines labeling her an unfit parent, while flashbulb moments like her shaving her head or attacking a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella turned her into a source for national mockery — but in the middle of the madness, Spears frequented nightclubs for inspiration, while recording what was to become her next album, 2007’s Blackout. For the first time in her career, there was no one to reel her in and she took agency, serving as executive producer of the project and exploring new sonic directions and collaborators. 

The result? Her magnum opus — demanding the attention of her peers, including Beyoncé and Rihanna, and the rest of the public eye. To this day, Blackout is still celebrated as an influential record for its edgy electro-pop sound and confidently sexual lyrics, and the album was even added to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s musical library and archive in 2012. Brash, experimental and self-aware in its almost-menacing approach, the set was fronted by the Danja-produced “Gimme More,” where the star asserted her celebrity with a seismic three-word intro: “It’s Britney, bitch.” The song reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 — a massive win, considering it followed a lethargic comeback performance of the track on the VMA stage that year that saw her body-shamed and ridiculed. 

Despite the universally panned performance and continued public derision of Spears’ personal life in the media, Blackout still sold 290,000 copies in its first week and bowed at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. Even with sizable hits on her hands like the media clapback “Piece of Me” (a top 15 Hot 100 hit, and also her first VMA win for video of the year the next September), her personal life was imploding. She lost physical custody of her sons, while separately, parents Jamie and Lynn Spears (and soon-to-be business manager Lou Taylor) orchestrated a conservatorship over her personhood and estate after putting the singer on a 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold under California state law. The temporary-turned-permanent arrangement declared Britney was incapable of managing her financial affairs and making basic life decisions, but her workload over the following years would prove otherwise.

With all autonomy lost, Spears was pushed to work almost immediately, and everyone turned a blind eye to her restricted freedom as she hit the gym with fresh blonde extensions. She appeared on CBS’ How I Met Your Mother, helping the series log its highest ratings ever, and began recording yet another album, Circus. The 2008 project and its promo cycle was marketed as her return to form, a comeback project to redeem her from the turbulence of recent years — and released on her birthday, no less. It produced the lead single, “Womanizer,” which brought her back to the top of the Hot 100 for the first time since “…Baby One More Time.” She was smiling, in-shape and seemingly happy — and the success continued with follow-up singles: the dance-ready title track (a No. 3 hit) and the cheeky “If U Seek Amy” (No. 19). 

The subsequent Circus Starring Britney Spears Tour made its way around the world, but much like an actual circus, the star of the show was being mistreated. A growing disconnect between Spears and her craft became evident in music and performances, showing up more prominently throughout her following releases. Her next album, Femme Fatale, which dropped in 2011, embraced the EDM trend of the early 2010s. While the hits kept on coming (“Hold it Against Me,” No. 1; “Till the World Ends,” with a much-hyped remix featuring Nicki Minaj and Ke$ha, No. 3; and “I Wanna Go,” No. 7), the charm and charisma was starting to lose its spark in her performances and the impact of the conservatorship had taken its toll. Her appearance on Rihanna’s “S&M” remix and “Scream & Shout,” alongside will.i.am, extended her streak of hits, but she was about to run another victory lap and change the face of Las Vegas entertainment forever — whether she liked it or not. 

After years of releasing albums and counterpart tours, Spears’ next move revitalized both her career and the Las Vegas entertainment scene. Once a refuge for singers looking to relive their glory days, Sin City was given a facelift when her 2013 residency landed and she became the first contemporary act of her time to hit the strip. Aptly titled Britney: Piece of Me, the 90-minute show featured more than two dozen hits, incorporating classics and fan favorites, with the bells and whistles of her typical pop production. The show debuted weeks before the release of Britney Jean, a makeshift album marketed as her most personal project to-date, yet only produced a medium-sized hit with the campy “Work Bitch” and drew middling reviews. 

While still a contrast from the performer she once was, the residency saw Spears slowly come into her own again, running for four years and grossing $137.7 million. And for a fleeting moment, Britney Spears was Britney Spears again – with her million-dollar smile, dancing to a medley of hits at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards, where she also became the third recipient of the BBMA Millennium Award honor. Towards the latter part of the Vegas residency, the singer dropped 2016’s Glory, her last studio album to date, and it sounded like the spark was back: The collection was led by Weeknd-esque “Make Me,” featuring G-Eazy, and followed by a remix of “Slumber Party” with then-newcomer Tinashe. Those singles didn’t become the enduring hits of her ’00s albums, but Glory received strong reviews and served as an invaluable experience for the star, who later described it as “the one thing … that [she] really put her heart into” during her decade-plus conservatorship. 

Once the residency wrapped, Spears was seemingly gaining her autonomy back, but a reported dance rehearsal dispute with her father led to the cancellation of a follow-up Vegas residency, Britney: Domination. One red flag led to another and eventually a whistleblower alleged that she had been forced into a mental health facility against her will  — and the Free Britney movement was born. Court documents and (most fascinatingly) her Instagram account suddenly became sources to fans for possible clues and hints about her true feelings, turning the conspiracy theory into a full blown pop culture movement, garnering support from other pop icons like Miley Cyrus and Cher. In 2021, the Framing Britney Spears documentary brought more attention, while fan-orchestrated protests outside of court and a brighter spotlight on conservatorship abuse eventually helped Spears secure the right to choose her own legal representation and dismantle the arrangement. Since then, Spears has also told her story on her own terms in her memoir, The Woman in Me, in 2023. The bombshell tell-all sold 1.1 million copies and became a New York Times best-seller within a week of its release. A film adaptation of the book directed by Jon M. Chu is currently in the works at Universal Pictures.

Britney Spears

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The future of Spears’ pop superstardom since ending the 13-year conservatorship remains in question. Since giving up her childhood to an industry that overlooked her creative vision and discounted her achievements, she’s focused on a different chapter of life. Today, she lives a life free from the shackles of her family and the guardianship, and is relearning just how to be an independent adult. For that, she stands as a survivor and perhaps a reluctant hero to many – one whose hits, performances and aesthetic have had an incalculable influence on the last 25 years of pop culture. 

Her 2022 Elton John teamup “Hold Me Closer” is her lone hit since the Glory cycle, yet her impact is still alive and well in 2024, even shaping a fresh new batch of stars. Just take a look at this year’s VMAs ceremonies, where countless new-gen pop stars, including Sabrina Carpenter, Tate McCrae and Megan Thee Stallion, incorporated allusions to classic Britney in their appearances and performances. It’s that multigenerational legacy that’s helped Spears become one of the few acts to span top 10 hits across four decades, further cementing her legacy as one of pop’s greatest. Now that she’s achieved her independence and control over her career, whether she’ll make a full return to pop music remains unclear — we only know that if and when she does, the entire pop world will be rapt in attention to watch Britney Spears do it again.

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back Tuesday as we kick off the top five with our No. 5 artist!

THE LIST SO FAR:

Honorable Mentions

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

With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. You can see the stars who have made our list so far here, and now we remember the century in Kanye West — whose career has featured near-unparalleled runs of artistic brilliance and pop cultural centrality, but whose legacy has grown more complicated by the year over the last decade.

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It’s funny now to think of a time when confusion over Kanye West’s first name was a common issue. Like NBA star Dwyane Wade (who, like West, also went pro in 2003-04), a lot of people who hadn’t seen or heard his name before – an Ethiopian-French name meaning “only one” – mentally jumbled the placement of the “y,” leading to a lot of first-time misspellings and mispronunciations when bracing it for the first time. The Netflix documentary jeen-yuhs includes an early-’00s scene of an unknowing receptionist referring to Kanye as “Cayenne,” and West himself even bemoaned the then-still-common cognition error in his 2005 hit “Diamonds From Sierra Leone”: “Now all I need is y’all to pronounce my name/ It’s Kanye, but some of my plaques, they still say ‘Kayne.’” 

Flash forward to two decades later, and it’s damn near impossible to imagine a single person on the planet who doesn’t know Kanye’s name. For a solid 20 years now, the monocultural figure has been in headlines on a weekly basis – sometimes daily, sometimes hourly – for just about every reason an artist can be. He’s been attached to stories about every kind of commercial and critical achievement: chart-topping singles and albums, best-of year-end and decade-end list placements, award wins and losses – even ones that weren’t his own. He’s also been at the center of celebrity weddings, billion-dollar business dealings, friendships and feuds with plenty of the other most famous people of the 21st century; one sitting U.S. president publicly thanked him for his “very cool” service, another called him a jackass. 

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And he’s also dominated the news for things no one should ever want to be known for – for ignorant comments and for allegations of terrible behavior, and for ensuing backlash that pushed him to the fringes of an industry he once lorded over from the absolute center. But even in 2024 – and even after he legally changed his name to the less scrambleable “Ye” – you can still never go too long without hearing the name Kanye. That’s how inextricable Mr. West was to American life in the first two decades of this century, that’s how brilliant his music and artistry were for the great majority of that period, that’s how blinding his sheer star power was throughout, and that’s how unshakeable he ultimately still remains in the culture today. 

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But before Kanye was the Kanye that the whole world would know, he began the 21st century as a Chi-town college dropout still trying to make his name as a producer. In the late ‘90s, he’d gotten beats on albums by hitmakers like Jermaine Dupri, Foxy Brown and Goodie Mob, but in 2000 that he would land the placement that would jumpstart the next phase of his career: “This Can’t Be Life,” from Jay-Z’s The Dynasty: Roc La Familia. The beat exemplified Kanye’s signature early-career production style: a classic soul sample, pitched up to the heavens, laid over the knocking snare from Dr. Dre’s “Xxplosive.” The song wasn’t a single, but it was a highlight from Jay’s third straight No. 1 album, getting him in the good graces of the rapper (and his Roc-a-Fella label) who was about to become the most powerful in hip-hop.

That takeover kicked off in earnest on 2001’s The Blueprint, Jay-Z’s career-defining masterpiece, on which Kanye placed five beats (including, appropriately, Jay’s beef track “Takeover”). The most important song on the set for the producer was “Izzo (H.O.V.A.),” a Jackson 5-lifting pop-rap singalong which gave the rapper his first Hot 100 top 10 hit as a lead artist, and gave the producer his first Hot 100 hit, period. From there, the floodgates opened for Kanye, and by the end of 2002, he’d scored Hot 100 hits with Scarface, Trina and Talib Kweli – as well as second Jay smash “03 Bonnie & Clyde,” this time with a newly solo Beyoncé riding shotgun – making him a rising star in a golden age of superproducers. 

But Kanye wasn’t satisfied with superproducerdom, since he’d long harbored aspirations of being an MC as well. While by 2002, hip-hop producers grabbing the mic had become relatively common – Kanye’s production heroes Dr. Dre and Q-Tip had both found stardom doing so in the ‘90s, while Pharrell’s falsetto was becoming as ubiquitous in 2000s top 40 as his beats – Kanye found difficulty convincing labels to take him seriously as a rapper, partly because his middle-class image and rhymes largely conflicted with the street rap ruling radio at the time. Eventually, Roc-a-Fella signed him — in large part to keep his beatmaking talents in-house — but even they weren’t totally convinced yet.

His debut single would quickly validate their decision. While Kanye had been garnering notice with mixtapes like Get Well Soon and I’m Good, as well as for additional hit beats for Alicia Keys (“You Don’t Know My Name”) and Ludacris (“Stand Up,” his first Hot 100 No. 1 as a producer), “Through the Wire” was the song that brought Kanye to national renown. Inspired by a near-fatal 2002 car accident – he rapped the song (over a chipmunked sample from Chaka Khan’s ‘80s R&B hit “Through the Fire”) while his jaw was still wired shut, hence the title – “Wire” introduced Kanye as a clever, compelling and culturally omnivorous underdog, winning listeners over with both its triumphant message and its well-placed references to everything from Vanilla Sky to Making the Band. Helped by an MTV-conquering living-collage music video, the song reached No. 15 on the Hot 100, establishing Kanye’s two-way bonafides and building massive buzz for his debut album. 

The College Dropout, released in Feb. 2004, lived up to the hype. Drawing rapturous reviews and debuting at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 441,000 in first-week sales, the album spawned three more huge hits in “All Falls Down,” “Jesus Walks” and “Slow Jamz” (his first Hot 100 No. 1 as a recording artist, though the song was originally featured on fellow Chicago rapper Twista’s Kamikaze album with Kanye as a featured artist). The album made Kanye a cultural phenomenon and media darling, as his pink polos, popped collars and unique combination of arrogance and insecurity (“We all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it,” he boasted on “Falls”) made him an irresistible presence, and his oft-uplifting storytelling drew stark contrast with the crime tales and caddishness of the previous year’s breakout rapper, 50 Cent. (50 would later theorize that his own ubiquity directly led to Kanye’s subsequent success.) 

In particular, “Jesus Walks” took Kanye into the center of public discourse for his grappling with his faith in a way that was extremely rare (and risky) for pop music at the time. The song only reached No. 11 on the Hot 100, lower than “Falls” and “Jamz,” but made its way to a lot of new fans outside of mainstream hip-hop, and drew the most critical acclaim of any of Dropout’s singles. “Jesus” nominated for two awards at the 2005 Grammys, where Ye’s attendance was a source of much discussion in the lead-up – since he’d previously crashed the stage at the 2004 American Music Awards to protest country hitmaker Gretchen Wilson beating him for best new artist. The awards outburst – certainly not the last of its kind for Ye – drew some backlash and ratcheted up Grammy night tension, which turned out to be for naught when he won best rap album for Dropout. “Everybody wanted to know what I would do if I didn’t win,” Kanye offered in his still-oft-referenced acceptance speech. “I guess we’ll never know.”

As successful as Kanye’s debut was, his sophomore album would prove it was just the beginning. Late Registration debuted at No. 1 in Aug. 2005 with nearly two times the first-week number of Dropout, and its second single – the Jamie Foxx-featuring “Gold Digger,” a comedic and absurdly catchy tribute to (and warning about) get-rich-quick female social climbers – became Kanye’s first No. 1 as a lead artist, and an immediate pop classic. The album’s expanded sonic palette, aided by co-producer (and regular Fiona Apple collaborator) Jon Brion, proved Ye was no one-trick wonder as a beatsmith, while songs like “Hey Mama” and “Heard ‘Em Say” plumbed new depths of personal and political subject matter lyrically. The latter side of Ye would also come into full focus that year on a televised benefit for those hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina, where his frustration over the then-President’s slow response in providing aid to the less-well-off victims of the incident boiled over into his second unforgettable quote of 2005: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” 

Kanye would spend much of 2006 touring – taking a brief pause for another stage-crashing incident at the ‘06 MTV EMAs, where he greeted news of his “Touch the Sky” losing best video to Justice vs. Simien’s “We Are Your Friends” with a loud “Oh, HELL no!” – and drawing inspiration for his next studio album, 2007’s “stadium status”-aspiring Graduation. Though the set was scheduled a week after rival 50 Cent’s Curtis album was due, Kanye later moved it up to the same day, starting a much-hyped sales battle that 50 would raise the stakes of by swearing he’d retire if he lost. Graduation ultimately soared past Curtis, selling 957,000 (still Kanye’s best first-week number) to Curtis’ 691,000, confirming Ye – who by then had also embraced electronic influences (particularly via Daft Punk-sampling lead single “Stronger,” another Hot 100 No. 1) and high fashion – as hip-hop’s present and future. Once again earning rave reviews, Graduation made Kanye 3-for-3, and very arguably the biggest artist in the world. (50 declined to retire as promised, but his career was never the same again.)

While Kanye was on top of the word artistically and commercially, he was about to hit a personal low. In late 2007, his mother Donda passed, and the next year, he broke off his engagement with long-time girlfriend Alexis Phifer – with both events inspiring the decidedly downbeat tone of his next album, 2008’s 808s and Heartbreak. Though Kanye had rarely sung on his records before, 808s mostly featured his Auto-Tuned warbling – with rapping kept to a minimum – of heart-on-sleeve lyrics over icy, synth-driven beats that felt a world away from the chipmunk soul he’d made his name on. The album became his third straight No. 1 and spawned a pair of top five Hot 100 hits in “Love Lockdown” and “Heartless,” but for the first time in his career, critics and fans were mixed on the new set. Time would largely prove Ye simply ahead of the curve, however, as the combination of chilly nu-wave sonics and hip-hop/R&B hybridized vocals (largely inspired by Kid Cudi, a signee to Ye’s GOOD Music imprint) ended up being profoundly influential on leading 2010s hitmakers like Travis Scott, Childish Gambino and Drake. 

Though 808s wasn’t the unqualified success of Kanye’s first three albums, he was still one of pop music’s leading artists at the time of the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. That night would quickly prove infamous for Ye, as the megastar – seen with a bottle of Hennessy on the red carpet – would grab the mic during Taylor Swift’s best female video acceptance speech to claim that the award should have gone to fellow nominee Beyoncé instead. Though Ye’s stage-crashing antics were well-known by that point, none of them had ever occurred on this widely watched an event, or with co-stars as well known as Swift or Beyoncé – or during the social media era, as the then-rising app Twitter gave everyone watching the opportunity to express their disbelief and/or disapproval in unison. Kanye had received blowback for plenty of moments in his career to this point, but never backlash on this level; the public response was so immediate and so loud that he pulled out of his planned Fame Kills tour alongside Lady Gaga and essentially went into hiding in Hawaii for the rest of the year. 

The experience ended up leading to Kanye’s next album, 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Recorded in a free-flowing Hawaii studio setup with a rotating cast of high-profile collaborators, Fantasy featured Ye really leaning into playing the anti-hero (if not the outright villain) for the first time on cinematic hits like “Power,” “Monster” and “All of the Lights,” with newly growling, grimy, ‘70s rock-influenced production. He did still make room for contrition, however, particularly on the spellbinding album centerpiece “Runaway,” which he unveiled with an instantly iconic performance at – where else? – the 2010 VMAs. The album debuted at No. 1 with nearly 500,000 in first-week sales, and drew Ye’s most ecstatic reviews yet: Leading critical voice Pitchfork, which a decade earlier had been an indie rock-rooted publication that might not have even reviewed a rap blockbuster like Fantasy, gave the set its first 10.0 score for a new album since 2002 – a sign not only of Ye’s now-unanimous acclaim, but of how he’d helped shift the entire critical discourse over the course of his career. 

For the next couple years, Ye was unquestionably back, and as entrenched in the mainstream as ever. In 2011, he teamed up with longtime collaborator, label head and big brother Jay-Z for the gaudy Watch the Throne, a purposeful exercise in hip-hop opulence and excess that nonetheless contained several classic moments: “N—as in Paris,” in particular, with its imminently quotable lyrics and earthquaking dubstep drop, proved a culture-moving moment, particularly when the duo started playing it double-digit times in a row on tour. The next year, his Cruel Summer quasi-compilation collected songs from then-rising GOOD Music artists like Big Sean, Teyana Taylor and newly solo Clipse rapper Pusha T – but the best and biggest songs were all headlined by Kanye, including the hit singles “Mercy” and “Clique.” Meanwhile, Ye had started to date reality TV superstar and budding entrepreneur Kim Kardashian, increasing his Q rating and pushing him to new corners of pop culture, as he also began premiering his “DW by Kanye West” lines of women’s clothing during Paris Fashion Week.

By summer 2013, it had been nearly three years since the last new Kanye solo album – the longest layover of his career to that point – and rumors of a dark and difficult set had long buzzed around hip-hop blogs and fan communities, many of which by this point (particularly the Kanye to The forum) were tracking Kanye’s happenings with singular diligence and worship. The rumors were true: after a ninth-inning edit job by legendary “reducer” Rick Rubin, Yeezus debuted as Ye’s most-abrasive and least-commercial set, equally influenced by 2010s Chicago drill rap and 1980s Chicago acid house, with largely aggressive, hedonistic lyrics that seemed to occasionally border on outright nihilism. Yeezus made Fantasy sound like “Through the Wire,” and not all listeners were down with the darkness – but the set generally drew song reviews and fan response, and became his sixth straight album to debut at No. 1. 

Beginning with Yeezus, though, West’s output generally trended away from playing the pop crossover game. Just a couple years earlier, he had picked up his fourth Hot 100 No. 1 by appearing on the single version of top 40 megastar Katy Perry’s “E.T.”; such pop appearances would quickly be unthinkable for the post-Yeezus Kanye, who began reserving his guest appearances almost exclusively for fellow rappers and occasional R&B stars. Music videos also became rarer, as did award show performances and media interviews – and Yeezus notably contained no pre-release singles, though “Bound 2” eventually became a No. 12 hit following the release of its Kim Kardashian-co-starring, easily parodied music video. 

In fact, West’s primary engagement with pop music and pop culture in the mid-’10s came through his continued back-and-forth with Swift – who, a half-decade after their initial VMAs conflict, was still linked to West in ways neither of them could really shake, with the latter apologizing for the incident but then later seemingly retracting his apology. At the 2015 VMAs, the two appeared to bury the hatchet, as Swift introduced West as the recipient of the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, with her speech even making joking reference to the ‘09 incident. But in early 2016, Kanye released “Famous,” which included the lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why?/ I made that b–ch famous,” seemingly resetting the dormant beef in an instant. Swift appeared to respond to the song when accepting the album of the year Grammy just days later, warning the young women watching of “the people along the way who try to… take credit for your accomplishments and your fame.” (A video for the song, released months later, would further the acrimony by picturing a nude wax sculpture of Swift, along with similar sculptures of Ye and many other celebrities, sleeping together in a giant bed.) 

“Famous” appeared on The Life of Pablo, Kanye’s first album since Yeezus, released in Feb. 2016 after several false starts and renamings. The album was less difficult than its predecessor, but far messier – particularly because West was still tinkering with the album by the time it was released as an exclusive on the new streaming service Tidal, of which he was a co-owner. Months into the album’s release, he was still reworking songs and fiddling with the tracklist – which, depending on who you asked, either made a profound statement on the permanent malleability of the album format in the streaming era or simply displayed Kanye’s increasing lack of artistic self-assuredness. Regardless, the set was mostly received well, giving Ye yet another No. 1 and spawning fan favorites like the two-part “Father Stretch My Hands,” the Kendrick Lamar teamup “No More Parties in LA” and the gospel-influenced, Chance the Rapper-spotlighting opener “Ultralight Beam.” 

More notable than the actual music on Pablo might have been the event that premiered it: a live listening party at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the largest scale such an event had been conceived on to that point. In truth it was far larger than even a simple arena gig, because thanks to livestreaming, it also became a communal event on social media, with secondhand excitement over the quasi-live show extended to the album itself. The Pablo era was further helped by the successful and acclaimed Saint Pablo Tour that followed, and the soon-omnipresent merch from it that – along with his increasingly successful Adidas partnership – officially turned Kanye into a lifestyle brand. Perhaps best of all for Ye, Snapchat video released online by Kim Kardashian – then his wife, as the couple were married in 2014 – seemed to show Swift giving him her pre-release approval for the controversial “Famous” lyric, which flipped public sentiment back against the pop megastar and towards Kanye. He was just a couple months away from ending 2016 on a high note to rival any in his career to that point. 

It was not to be that simple. West’s year was shaken first by wife Kardashian’s robbery at gunpoint in Paris that October, forcing him to cancel multiple Pablo dates. Then, after Donald Trump was elected president in November, Kanye expressed onstage that he didn’t vote in the election, but would have supported Trump if he had – kicking off a run of erratic on-stage behavior that also included his ranting about Beyoncé’s alleged politicking at the 2016 VMAs and how Jay-Z never called him after Kardashian’s robbery. He eventually pulled the plug on the rest of the tour, and was hospitalized that Thanksgiving for temporary psychosis – after which he had a controversial summit at Trump Tower with the then-president to discuss “multicultural issues,” much to the horror of many of his peers, including longtime collaborator John Legend. It was a brutal end to a once-triumphant year. 

The rest of the decade was a rocky period for Kanye. He released two more albums, 2018’s introspective, seven-track Ye – part of a five-album “Wymoning Sessions” series all produced by Kanye, which also included his Kids See Ghosts teamup with longtime collaborator Kid Cudi – and 2019’s gospel-themed Jesus Is King, and again topped the Billboard 200 with both. But both sets drew mixed reviews, and as became increasingly the case with Kanye post-Pablo, got more attention for their bumpy releases and listening party premiere events than for most of the music actually contained therein. Meanwhile, he made further public appearances in support of then-President Trump, began to speak out against abortion and the Black Lives Matter movement, and most infamously, said to TMZ about Black slavery that “when you hear about slavery for 400 years … for 400 years? That sounds like a choice” – comments that earned swift, massive backlash from both fans and the media. (Later that year, he apologized for “how that slave comment made people feel.”) Even the Taylor Swift feud flipped back on Kanye, as 2020 saw the leak of a longer version of the infamous “Famous” approval conversation between the two stars, seemingly adding more context and validity to Swift’s claims that she never gave full approval to the “b–ch” lyric. 

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Still, no matter how severe the fallout from any of his controversies, at the turn of the 2020s Kanye still clearly held the public’s interest whenever he released an album, or debuted a new shoe line, or held a high-profile concert – or engaged in a high-profile beef, as he did with 2010s rap kingpin Drake in the lead-up to his 2021 album Donda. After Ye held what was essentially a promotional residency at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, literally living in the stadium between promotional events as he attempted to finalize the set, the 27-track collection was belatedly released in June, and again entered at No. 1, with 309,000 units moved, the highest mark of the year to that point. The occasionally inspired but wildly overstuffed album had its supporters, and earned an album of the year Grammy nomination – but as Drake’s Certified Lover Boy album was released the next week to an even bigger first-week bow, and then the two rappers made up months later for the Free Larry Hoover concert, it was hard not to feel like the entire era was more sound than fury.

The next year would bring about new lows for Kanye, as Oct. 22 kicked off with him wearing an inflammatory “WHITE LIVES MATTER” t-shirt at a Yeezy SZN Paris fashion show, then making a post to Instagram calling Black Lives Matter “a scam.” Later in the month, West had his accounts locked on both Instagram and Twitter for comments perceived as anti-semitic, particularly a tweet that threatened to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” The rapper’s rhetoric continued, and eventually his business partners began to sever ties with him – including his CAA agency, his UMG parent label, and even his Adidas shoe partners, about whom Kanye had recently boasted, “I can say anti-semitic things and Adidas can’t drop me.” (In Dec. 2023, Kanye would apologize for his comments in an Instagram statement: “I sincerely apologize to the Jewish community for any unintended outburst caused by my words or actions.”)

And yet, even with seemingly all of his industry backing lost, Kanye remains majorly impactful in present day. His Instagram apology was followed in early 2024 with the independent release of his Ty Dolla $ign teamup Vultures 1 – again, after plenty of false starts, delays and listening-event hype, and again, with a No. 1 debut on the Billboard 200. This time, the set was also able to do something no Kanye album had done since before Yeezus: spawn a major, long-lasting Hot 100 hit, with the soccer-chanting, No. 1-peaking “Carnival,” also featuring Playboi Carti and Rich the Kid. The song carried some of the red-eyed, goblin-mode spark of Ye’s best early-2010s work – though in calling back to some of those songs rather explicitly (including a mid-song sample of Fantasy’s “Hell of a Life”), it missed both the ingenuity and the shock of the new that made them so special. 

When you tell the story of Kanye West’s career, you realize how few of the larger narratives about 21st century popular music could be related without him. The mixtape hip-hop era of the early 2000s, rap’s mainstream takeover in the mid-’00s and the blog era in the late deacde, the EDM breakthrough and pop star megaboom of the turn of the 2010s, the complete reinvention of music consumption throughout the social media and streaming ages of the ‘10s, the event-ification of pop music in the late ‘10s, and the outsized role of identity politics and post-#MeToo questions of cancelation (or at least accountability) within the industry that have hung over all of entertainment for the past eight years… Nearly every important sonic, cultural or technological trend in the last 25 years of popular music has been touched by Kanye, and none of these chapters of pop history could be written without extensive mention of him. Sometimes on the first page. Sometimes in the first sentence.

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It’s impossible to deny Kanye’s impact, or his greatness. But it’s equally impossible to deny the impact that his hurtful comments and bad behavior (allegations of which have continued in 2024) have had on his overall legacy. He’s hardly the only one: Rock, rap and even pop history are all full of critical figures whose problematic conduct threatens to overshadow or at least taint their seismic contributions to the genre. How much it impacts our own personal enjoyment or listening habits when it comes to their music – either going forward or looking back – is something every fan must figure out for themselves. But clearly, even with Kanye’s recent chart comeback, he’s been ostracized from too many corners of pop music and pop culture to ever be as central to either as he was at his near-decade-and-a-half peak – and now, for many, even memories from that peak have been regrettably shaded to the point where they will never quite feel the same again. 

Still, it’s a testament to just how singular that peak run was, and how impactful it was on popular music and culture – in countless ways we can still feel the reverberations of today, and others we might not properly understand for decades yet to come  – that so many still bother with Kanye at all. Perhaps no other artist since Prince has better matched the Purple One’s combination of mold-breaking creativity with record-breaking commercial success, of studio perfectionism and prolificity with spellbinding performance abilities and iconic visuals, of cultural innovation and technological wizardry with personal artistry and deep soulfulness. And like Prince, he can change his name to whatever he wants, but the world will still never, ever forget the name Kanye. 

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back Tuesday as we reveal our No. 6 artist!

THE LIST SO FAR:

Honorable Mentions

25. Katy Perry24. Ed Sheeran23. Bad Bunny22. One Direction21. Lil Wayne20. Bruno Mars19. BTS18. The Weeknd17. Shakira16. Jay-Z15. Miley Cyrus14. Justin Timberlake13. Nicki Minaj12. Eminem11. Usher10. Adele9. Ariana Grande8. Justin Bieber

With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. You can see the stars who have made our list so far here, and now we remember the century in Justin Bieber — who has now been a megastar for half his 30 years, accounting for some of the best and biggest pop music (and one of the most impactful career paths) of the past 15 years in the process.

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Anyone who saw Justin Bieber’s 2007 cover of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” could tell he was going to be famous.

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The blurry clip of a barely discernible 13-year-old Bieber seems like nothing special at first, just a video his mom Pattie Mallette uploaded to the platform for his extended family to check out. “I know the videos of him are dark but you can hear him and get a sense of his stage presence,” Mallette wrote in the caption of the video, in which the teen is dressed in an unusually formal white button-down shirt, trousers and a tie. His magic quickly became apparent, as soon as Bieber began to belt the R&B track with a shocking sense of vocal ease for someone so young. He confidently makes his way around the stage, making eye contact with different audience members and never once seeming nervous, as if even he knew he was destined to be a superstar.

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Even “superstar” feels like an understatement. With 23 Grammy nominations (and two wins), eight No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, eight Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping songs, 33 Guinness World Records, 26 Billboard Music Awards, four RIAA-certified diamond records and an estimated 150 million records sold over the course of his career, 30-year-old Bieber has been a crucial part of the pop landscape for more than a decade, setting a new standard for pop artists to come by being a trailblazer in using social media to his advantage, without the need for radio or MTV backing to cross over to mainstream success. 

However, perhaps none of that would have been possible without a serendipitous discovery from Scooter Braun, the now-titan of the music industry who, at the time, was a marketing executive of So So Def Recordings. After accidentally stumbling upon the “So Sick” clip on YouTube, Bieber’s smooth voice and the “stage presence” his mother pointed out caught his attention. With the blessing of his mother, Bieber was flown down to Atlanta, Georgia – nearly 900 miles away from his hometown of Stratford, Ontario – to record some demos with Braun, who quickly introduced him to now-grown teen-pop royalty Usher. At just 13 years old, Bieber signed with Braun and Usher’s joint venture, Raymond Braun Media Group, and a year later, also signed with Island Records.

The good fortune kept pouring in for Bieber, who made achieving fame seem so easy. His debut single, “One Time,” was released in July 2009 and his first EP, My World, dropped just a few months later in November. “One Time,” “One Less Lonely Girl,” “Love Me” and “Favorite Girl” from the project entered the top 40 of the Hot 100. My World eventually became certified platinum in the United States.

But what was it about Bieber that made him so immediately popular? Sure, his honeyed vocals and his catchy love songs were enough to get fans to swoon, but there was a significant lack of male pop stars in the music market at the time. Another Justin – Timberlake – was still taking over radio with songs like “What Goes Around… Comes Around” and “Summer Love,” but he was 26 years old at the time, and many of his fans also skewed older. Bieber was the perfect age for young, hormonal teenage fans who soon coined the term “Bieber Fever,” a Beatlemania-type craze over Bieber’s bright smile, charming personality and swooping hairstyle that inspired similar ‘dos for boys across the globe for years to come.

Bieber Fever spread strongly into the start of 2010, when JB dropped the Ludacris-assisted “Baby,” the first single off his debut full-length project, My World 2.0. The track skyrocketed Bieber into a success for a global audience beyond the tweens that loved his 2009 EP, hitting top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album, which was released in March 2010, featured a slew of other longstanding hit singles, including “Somebody to Love,” “U Smile,” “That Should Be Me” and “Eenie Meenie” featuring Sean Kingston. The project debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and earned him his first two Grammy nominations, for best new artist and best pop vocal album.

Bieber was now 16 years old, and wasn’t planning on slowing down yet. 2011 was just as busy as his previous two years. His Jon M. Chu-directed concert film Justin Bieber: Never Say Never hit theaters in February –  grossing $30 million on its opening weekend and $99 million total worldwide. The film arrived alongside a remix album, Never Say Never: The Remixes, which featured appearances from fellow stars including Usher, Miley Cyrus and Chris Brown. In his personal life, he also confirmed his relationship with another young star, Wizards of Waverly Place actress and pop singer Selena Gomez, when the couple made their red carpet debut at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party that year. He rounded out 2011 with his holiday album, Under the Mistletoe, which became the first Christmas album by a male artist to top the Billboard 200.

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By the time his third studio album Believe arrived in June 2012, Bieber’s fame reached unprecedented levels of chaos and success. Still a teenager, he couldn’t leave the house without being hounded by paparazzi and fans, and he survived his first public controversy when a pregnant fan claimed Bieber was her baby daddy. While the paternity test came back negative, the experience inspired the Believe track “Maria,” a modern “Billie Jean” denying that he fathered the child. 

Clearly, Bieber was growing up, and Believe reflected that. The singer had gone through puberty and his voice was noticeably lower, and the track list strayed away from his past teen-pop sound, as Bieber played with elements of dance, R&B and hip-hop reflect a newer, more mature chapter in his career. Believe debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and featured Hot 100 top 10 hits including “Boyfriend,” “Beauty and a Beat” featuring Nicki Minaj and the Big Sean-assisted “As Long As You Love Me.” With four chart-topping albums under his belt, Bieber’s Believe Tour launched in September 2012, and grossed $212.2 million across 155 shows.

However, by the start of 2013, the negative effects of childhood fame on mental health began to appear. Bieber and Gomez split for the first time in November 2012, and in March 2013, Bieber was getting aggressive with paparazzi in London. He soon began to display increasingly erratic behavior – including wearing a gas mask to dinner, urinating in a nightclub’s cleaning bucket (as well as on a photo of Bill Clinton), spitting on fans, sneaking out of a Brazilian brothel while wearing a sheet, vandalism and, of course, writing that he hoped Anne Frank would have been a “Belieber” in the Anne Frank House guestbook – and Bieber announced in December 2013 via Twitter that he was “officially retiring.” The announcement came just a day after he released his singles collection Journals, which continued to display his artistic maturity by experimenting with downtempo R&B on songs like “All That Matters” and “Confident.” However, the sound was a bit too jarring for his pop-loving fans, and the album flopped commercially compared to his previous works. 

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His retirement proved to be equally turbulent. In January 2014, he was arrested in Miami Beach, after getting pulled over in a bright yellow Lamborghini. He was charged with driving under the influence, resisting arrest and driving with a suspended license. He later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of reckless driving. Bieber later revealed that from the ages of 19 to 21, he was heavily addicted to drugs – including prescription pills, lean, psychedelic mushrooms, MDMA and marijuana, which he used as a coping mechanism for extreme amounts of anxiety and pressure he was understandably feeling at the time. 

Things began looking up again for Bieber in 2015, when he found his sense of Purpose with his sixth Billboard 200 leader and his most successful commercial project to date, led by his comeback hit “Where Are Ü Now” with Skrillex and Diplo, an unexpected and successful pivot by the star into the EDM landscape. He followed it up with “What Do You Mean?,” which became his first leader on the Billboard Hot 100, clearly indicating that the music scene was missing Bieber’s presence. The project produced two more No. 1 hits, “Sorry” and “Love Yourself,” which remain inescapable on the radio and streaming playlists to this day. While the Purpose tour kicked off in March 2016 to build on the success of the groundbreaking album, Bieber’s mental health issues persisted. The run was canceled in July 2017 as the singer shifted focus on his well being. 

Over the next two years, Bieber lent his vocals to a handful of successful collaborations, including DJ Khaled’s “I’m the One,” BloodPop’s “Friends” and the inescapable hit of 2017, a remix of Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito.” The historic track marked a major step in Latin music breaking into the global mainstream, and spent a whopping 16 weeks atop the Hot 100, then tied for the longest run in the chart’s history. However, at 23 years old and nearly a decade into his career, Bieber seemed to be taking a much-needed break from his recording career. In late 2017, he began opening up about the effects of childhood stardom in interviews and in his music in order to put his past actions into perspective and highlight his immense growth.

By 2018, he rekindled his romance with model Hailey Baldwin, and the two were married in September of that year. A year later, he announced that his fifth studio album, Changes, was on the way, and released a vulnerable, in-depth YouTube Originals docuseries. The 10-part series focused on the ups and downs of Bieber’s life throughout his musical hiatus, including his marriage, sobriety journey, battle against Lyme disease and mental health. In the grand scheme of his career, the docuseries marked a major pivot for good, with Bieber shedding the pop star persona and showing fans the human at the core.

Bieber dropped Changes in 2020, and subsequently gained three Grammy nominations and one win for best country duo/group performance for his Dan + Shay collaboration, “10,000 Hours.” Justice arrived a year later and was nominated for album of the year and best pop vocal album at the 2022 Grammy Awards. The album’s standout hit, “Peaches,” became his first Hot 100 No. 1 of the 2020s and gained four nominations including record of the year and song of the year. Justice also featured the Benny Blanco collaboration, “Lonely,” a devastatingly raw look at how fame sent Bieber into a downward and isolated spiral, capturing his past 15 years in one single. “Everybody saw me sick/ And it felt like no one gave a s—/ They criticized the things I did as an idiot kid,” he sings on the diaristic track. 

Now, in 2024, Bieber hasn’t released a new single or album in a few years, but it seems like the 30-year-old star is experiencing a healthy, loving life for the first time, much to fans’ happiness. He’s been married to Baldwin for six years, and the duo welcomed their first child, a son named Jack Blues Bieber, over the summer. With his whole life to that point being spent on overdrive, it’s relieving to see Bieber cruising and enjoying his newest adventure, fatherhood. Hopefully, the ride will inspire yet another chart-topping album – and one more example of his one-of-kind presence, which has persistently shined through the darkness for over 15 years now.

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back Thursday as we reveal our No. 7 artist!

THE LIST SO FAR:

Honorable Mentions

25. Katy Perry24. Ed Sheeran23. Bad Bunny22. One Direction21. Lil Wayne20. Bruno Mars19. BTS18. The Weeknd17. Shakira16. Jay-Z15. Miley Cyrus14. Justin Timberlake13. Nicki Minaj12. Eminem11. Usher10. Adele9. Ariana Grande

With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. You can see the stars who have made our list so far here, and now we remember the century in Ariana Grande — whose standard-defying approach to pop music saw her withstand expectations and stigma to become one of the most prolific examples of what pop sovereignty can look like in the streaming era.

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It’s easy to view Ariana Grande’s rise to the highest echelons of pop stardom as a classic, uncomplicated success story within the music business. The child-actor-turned-pop-sensation route is well-trodden, after all, and at first glance, the 31-year-old singer-songwriter appears to be yet another benefactor of that industry pipeline.

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Yet once you dig further into her career, it becomes clear that her success was far from guaranteed. Over the course of the last decade-and-change, Grande created lasting hits amidst a mercurial musical landscape, endured unimaginable hardships and deftly navigated an industry that seemed to grow more volatile by the minute. Her standing today as a veritable icon is less a reflection of the efficacy of established systems that promoted her rise, and more a testament to her enduring, generational talent.

The star’s achievement came in part thanks to her drive for greatness from an early age. Born and raised in Boca Raton, Fla., Grande began her work towards a music career earlier than most — at age eight, she was already publicly performing on cruise ships, sporting events and her own personal YouTube channel, catching the attention of her family, her peers and even icons like Gloria Estefan. By the time she turned 13, the aspiring star had already booked her first professional gig as the bubbly, popular cheerleader Charlotte in the 2008 Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s musical 13.

Ariana Grande

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Her foothold in the entertainment industry firmly established, Grande soon landed her breakthrough role as the loveable ditz Cat Valentine on Nickelodeon’s Victorious. With a sing-song voice proclaiming increasingly zany one-liners over the course of the show’s run, the character quickly rose among the ranks of the children’s network’s beloved characters — thanks, especially, to the impressive vocal chops Grande got to occasionally flaunt throughout the three season run. Valentine became so popular among the network’s fans that she earned her own spinoff series with iCarly’s Sam Puckett (Jennette McCurdy) on 2013’s Sam & Cat. 

The standout support for her character provided a natural on-ramp to Grande’s own musical aspirations — who better than the perky-best-friend-type to deliver a string of uncomplicated pop songs? For her 2011 debut single “Put Your Hearts Up,” Grande and her team at Republic Records aimed to capitalize on that progression with a bubblegum anthem in the style of the day’s superstars like Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. But “Hearts” came and went, missing the Billboard charts and falling to bigger, bolder turbo-pop anthems of the era. Grande herself would later acknowledge that “Hearts Up” made more sense coming from her character than it did from her, making the entire experience feel “inauthentic and fake.” 

So when it came time for her to reintroduce herself, Grande stepped away from the saccharine schtick of her Nickelodeon persona and leaned into her love of R&B. 2013’s “The Way,” featuring rising alt-hip-hop star Mac Miller, provided Grande with a streamlined, ebullient palette cleanser, placing the singer’s stratospheric four-octave range front and center. Vague, kid-friendly proclamations about giving a little love to change the world were exchanged for lyrics depicting a more mature, albeit still unspecific, approach to romance. Employing curated ‘90s sounds — including a lift of the central piano riff from Big Pun’s 1998 hit “Still Not a Player” — Grande happily aged herself up, gleefully drawing early comparisons between her airy, whistle-toned voice and The Voice, Mariah Carey. This, she told her eager fans, was the Ariana Grande she wanted to be.

Her audience certainly took that message to heart, earning the star her first of many top 10 debuts on the Hot 100. With “The Way,” Grande was ushered forth as a soon-to-be-star. Her subsequent debut album Yours Truly confirmed that “The Way” was the rule, not the exception — for every track on the record that didn’t quite work (like the doop-wop-meets-EDM strangeness of “Daydreamin’”), there was another that shined (the surefire R&B-pop killer “Piano” still stands out to this day), signaling the singer-songwriter’s vast potential in the pop space. With a No. 1 debut on Billboard 200, Yours Truly heralded the advent of Grande’s oncoming dominance.

Where 2013 saw Ariana arrive, the summer of 2014 saw her quickly start to take over. Her face adorned the covers of Billboard, Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue, wherein she earnestly began to separate herself from her child star roots — never quite falling into the stereotypical “good girl gone bad” persona, but instead offering new context to buffer between the public’s introduction to her through Cat Valentine and the pop star she aimed to be. As her pop persona developed, so did her image; gone were the flame-red locks that defined her Nickelodeon career, replaced now by her natural brunette hair tied up in a stratospheric ponytail. 

All the while, her music became utterly inescapable: “Problem,” her funk-fueled dance-pop diatribe featuring rapper-of-the-moment Iggy Azalea, dominated the airwaves in the early summer (bolstered in part by a whisper hook from her then-beau Big Sean); “Break Free,” her Zedd-produced EDM-pop anthem, gained steam shortly thereafter; and “Bang Bang,” her girlboss team-up with Jessie J and Nicki Minaj, exploded into the zeitgeist. 

As each of her three singles peaked within the Hot 100’s top three slots at the end of August, Grande became the second woman in the history of the chart (alongside Adele) to maintain three tracks simultaneously in the top 10 as a lead artist. By the time Grande’s powerhouse sophomore LP My Everything arrived — along with its fourth-straight top-10 hit “Love Me Harder” featuring a then-lesser-known alt-R&B act called The Weeknd — the singer had already been ordained as the Next Big Thing in pop music, just one year after her debut album dropped.

With that attention came a predictable wave of controversy. Fans accused Grande of acting like a “diva” to her fans, with some drawing comparisons to her pop idol Mariah Carey. Rumors swirled of a feud with her Sam & Cat co-star Jennette McCurdy. A September 2014 headline in The Washington Post warned that the pop star was “on the brink of a major image problem,” stating that, as undeniable as Grande’s talent was, she was still a “very, very new name” in an industry with “a strange fascination with seeing the ‘fall’ of a newcomer as much as the ‘rise.’”

Ariana Grande

Courtesy Photo

But nothing could have prepared us for one of the most deeply bizarre celebrity scandals of the 2010s — Donutgate. A leaked security video caught Grande licking a donut on display at a bakery in Lake Elsinore, Ca., while proclaiming that she “hates America” and kissing her backup dancer Ricky Alvarez. The public reaction came swiftly, with fans, pundits and industry professionals alike asking, what the hell is a rising star doing tonguing a donut she didn’t buy? A drop from Wikileaks would later reveal that even the Obama White House kept their distance, rejecting a proposal for Ariana to perform. The star made multiple apologies for the incident, assuring the public that her actions were those of a dumb kid, promising that “I’m going to learn from my mistakes.” 

Still, it wasn’t until 2016’s flirtatious and sonically fluctuating Dangerous Woman that Grande faced diminishing returns. Its intended lead single “Focus” earned too little attention on the charts, and too much attention as a reskin of 2014’s “Problem,” that the label decided to cut it wholecloth from the album. The set became her first not to clinch the top spot on the Billboard 200, failing to dethrone Drake’s Views for its reign atop the chart. Critics, meanwhile, were divided over the album’s sound. Some praised the singer for taking a bolder, more daring approach to her established pop-n-b aesthetic, singling out the bombastic retro-soul title track “Dangerous Woman” and provocative reggae-pop Nicki Minaj duet “Side to Side.” Others heard the sound of a would-be superstar still struggling to figure out her sound three albums later.

A slight career dip certainly didn’t deter Grande from cementing her position as the pop star of the day. In March 2016, she served double duty as host and musical guest on SNL, poking fun at Donutgate; a few months later, she dazzled audiences with her spot-on impersonations of Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears on The Tonight Show; in September, she showcased her blissful romance with now-boyfriend Miller on his “My Favorite Part;” she even closed out the year on NBC’s telecast of Hairspray Live, playing the role of Penny Singleton alongside stage and screen stars like Jennifer Hudson, Harvey Fierstein and Martin Short. As she embarked on her second arena tour in 2017 — which would go on to gross $71 million, according to Billboard Boxscore — Grande appeared to be an unstoppable force. 

Tragedy, as it turned out, is an immovable object. On May 22, 2017, minutes after Grande’s live performance concluded at the UK’s Manchester Arena, a terrorist detonated a suicide bomb in the arena’s foyer. 22 people were killed in the attack — twelve of whom were under the age of 16 — marking the deadliest act of terrorism on British soil since the 7/7 bombings of 2005. A public inquiry revealed in 2022 that more than 800 people were injured as a result of the attack. Grande escaped the attack physically unharmed, but emotionally “broken,” as she wrote in a tweet the day following the attack. 

In the years to come, Grande would describe her experience with post-traumatic stress disorder following the attack, and the immense anxiety she suffered as a result. “I know those families and my fans, and everyone there experienced a tremendous amount of it as well … I shouldn’t even be talking about my own experience,” she told British Vogue. “I don’t think I’ll ever know how to talk about it and not cry.” 

After successfully hosting her One Love Manchester benefit show — featuring artists including Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus to help raise over $13 million for the attack’s victims — Grande finished out the remainder of her postponed tour and retreated from the public eye. Where her Twitter and Instagram accounts were once littered with personal messages recounting her day-to-day experiences with fame, now there was a deafening silence. 

Perhaps that’s why so many view “No Tears Left To Cry” as the turning point in Grande’s already impressive career. Over the course of three and a half minutes, the singer reset the narrative, acknowledging the abject horror she and her fans had been through while defiantly promising to move forward with light and optimism. House and disco stylings delivered the burst of joy she so earnestly sought on the track, bringing Grande’s vision for herself and her fans firmly into the forefront of the cultural consciousness. Yet what made “Tears” so remarkable was Ariana’s deft handling of tone: The song never comes across as a purely enthusiastic rallying cry, nor does it fit the mold of mournful reflections on loss — instead, Grande pulled off its own galvanizing message of picking it up and moving on. 

Ariana Grande

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Ariana Grande

With the album that followed, 2018’s Sweetener, Grande found something deeper than any of her past works. Albums like My Everything and Dangerous Woman took a kitchen-sink approach to finding what sounds produced hits, with Grande trying on new pop diva personas to best fit each package. Sweetener, by contrast, provided no artifice: It was just Ariana, the confessional, sometimes goofy, always-earnest singer-songwriter embracing the most vulnerable parts of herself. Though the album never quite achieved the level of chart domination exhibited during My Everything’s undeniable 2014 run, it exhibited an evolution, both artistic and personal, that once eluded Grande.

The album’s commercial success was certainly helped by the fact that Ariana had become the hottest topic in the months leading up to and following its release, thanks in no small part to her whirlwind romance with SNL star Pete Davidson. Tabloids, paparazzi, social media and the public at large were obsessed with the odd couple. When they were in public together, photos appeared online in seconds; when Ariana shared a one-minute interlude on Sweetener named after the comedian, articles appeared dissecting its romantic lyrics; and when the pop superstar bragged about her sudden fiancé’s “BDE,” fans turned it into a meme. 

But a question arose from Sweetener’s shift — could Ariana Grande, Serious Artist coexist with Ariana Grande, Cultural Phenomenon? Within four months of the album’s release, a resounding answer crash-landed in the form of an out-of-nowhere, cycle-breaking single that smashed through Ariana’s own release pattern and her audience’s presuppositions. “Thank U, Next,” Grande’s cheeky response to the media storm around her breakup with Davidson and the death of her ex-boyfriend and collaborator Mac Miller, deftly toed the line between her blockbuster era and her newfound emotional honesty. Memes, think pieces, reviews and shot-by-shot analyses of its Mean Girls-inspired video poured out in the weeks to come, only further bolstered by the song’s No. 1 debut on the Hot 100 — somehow the first of the pop star’s career.

From that point forward, Grande became the invincible pop juggernaut that had been promised since her debut. The track’s follow-up — the Sound of Music-interpolating hip-hop jam “7 Rings” — immediately earned Grande her second No. 1; the release of her lauded fifth studio album Thank U, Next saw Ariana beat Cardi B’s record for the most simultaneous top 40 hits by a female artist. She even became the first solo artist in the history of the Hot 100 to simultaneously occupy the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 spots, and then the only act in 55 years to do so since The Beatles. Perhaps the most telling records that Grande managed to smash in 2019 came from Spotify: Upon its release, Thank U, Next shattered streaming giant Ed Sheeran’s record for the most weekly streams of any pop album, while within a year, Grande became the most streamed female artist on Spotify, surpassing pop superhero Rihanna.

Ariana Grande

Nicholas Hunt/FilmMagic

Where Adele had revitalized the art of album sales in 2010, Grande became proof of concept at how the streaming era could generate gargantuan pop idols in the modern music business. Curating the social media experience for her army of Arianators over the course of her career paid dividends in Grande’s modern eras, as her loyal fan base rallied to support their fave at all costs, even as they occasionally crossed the line with comments about her image and personal life. She learned from the prolificacy of her hip-hop contemporaries like Drake that more was more when it came to content creation. Putting those two skills together, Grande became the artist to beat in the streaming game. 

A global pandemic couldn’t even seem to stop Grande’s cultural takeover. A pair of early-lockdown collaborations — the retro-pop Justin Bieber duet “Stuck With U” and the French house Lady Gaga banger “Rain on Me” — earned Grande another pair of Hot 100-toppers. A year later, her sultry turn on renewed superstar The Weeknd’s “Save Your Tears” turned the slow-burning hit into an immediate chart-topper, sending the song to No. 1 on the Hot 100 within two weeks of its release. Even when her sixth LP Positions fell short of critics’ newly lofty expectations, she still took both the album and its title track to the summit of the Billboard 200 and Hot 100, respectively. 

Today, even if her commercial power has waned from its 2019-2020 zenith, Grande has found a level of consistency amongst her cultural ubiquity. Eternal Sunshine, the singer’s sparkling meta-narrative on the pitfalls of public image, spawned yet another pair of No. 1 hits for the singer-songwriter, as well as earning a debut atop the Billboard 200. And as she gears up for her lifelong dream of playing Glinda in the long-awaited film adaptation of Wicked, it seems that Grande has come full circle, all the way back around to her theater roots. 

Trace that ring from start to finish, and you’ll witness something fascinating; a young woman who managed not only to transform her pain into prosperity, but created a mold-breaking model for success. The career framework Grande built has only benefitted recent pop ingénues like Sabrina Carpenter and Tate McRae, who’ve capitalized on her streaming-focused strategies and sweetly melodic (and slyly winking) pop&B sound to rocket-launch their own music. Ariana Grande consciously changed how pop music is perceived and enjoyed by the masses, in a way a new generation of fans and artists will forever be so f–king grateful for. 

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back Thursday as we reveal our No. 9 artist!

THE LIST SO FAR:

Honorable Mentions

25. Katy Perry24. Ed Sheeran23. Bad Bunny22. One Direction21. Lil Wayne20. Bruno Mars19. BTS18. The Weeknd17. Shakira16. Jay-Z15. Miley Cyrus14. Justin Timberlake13. Nicki Minaj12. Eminem11. Usher10. Adele

On today’s (Oct. 16) episode of the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century podcast, we kick off the top 10 of our list with a singer-songwriter who defied pretty much every trend that defined pop music at the outset of the 2010s — and still zoomed past everyone else to become the best-selling artist […]

With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. You can see the stars who have made our list so far at the bottom of this post — but first, we remember the century in Adele, a powerhouse presence and unlikely superstar who emerged from a pop golden age to put up numbers most of her peers could only dream about.

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No one could have possibly seen Adele coming. 

By the year 2010, Adele was already a Grammy-winning global hitmaker, so you couldn’t really say she came out of nowhere. But during a period of pop music that was quintessentially BIG – in sound, in scope, in ambition and in commercial returns – for the biggest artist by a near-exponential magnitude to turn out to be the British singer-songwriter with all the weepy breakup ballads was borderline-unthinkable, even as it was becoming an increasingly obvious reality. And for her to get even bigger from there, until she was putting up stats no other pop phenomenon had achieved before or has matched since – even as the music industry around her was supposedly in failing health – remains dizzying to think about a decade later.

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How did she do it? With a singularly mighty voice, an industrial-strength artistic identity, an unexpectedly earthy sense of humor, and of course, a handful of no-doubt five-star pop songs. And somewhat counter-intuitively, also with good timing: Most of early-2010s pop music consisted of futuristic dance-pop jams pushing a pro-partying agenda with a pre-apocalyptic undercurrent, making Adele’s retro-leaning soul-pop a much-needed breath of fresh air. Perhaps more importantly, though, her albums were also simply a breath – stripped-down, emotionally raw sets that invited you to hit pause on the urgency of the present and the anxiety of the future and spend 40-plus minutes in the gentle thrall of an artist tapping into something truly timeless. 

Adele

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Adele

Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

But before she was a record-setting world-beater, Adele was simply one breakout artist from the latest British Invasion – and not the moment’s biggest or flashiest. Multiple soulful U.K. singer-songwriters were making waves on U.S. shores in the late ‘00s, a mini-movement largely kicked off by Amy Winehouse’s unexpected 2007 global breakthrough with her Back to Black album. Winehouse’s massive success, larger-than-life personality and perpetual tabloid presence towered over her peers of the time, and Adele’s 2008 debut album 19 was dogged with comparisons to Back to Black and press insistence on dubbing her “The New Amy.” 

Even still, 19 managed to make a major impression on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., the album drew strong reviews for Adele’s strong songwriting and strikingly rich voice; Billboard wrote that she “truly has potential to become among the most respected and inspiring international artists of her generation.” The album started slow commercially in the States, but was boosted by Adele’s head-turning October performance on a much-watched Saturday Night Live episode, which hoisted the album to the Billboard 200’s top 10 and helped its heartbroken “Chasing Pavements” become her first stateside crossover hit, reaching No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Recording Academy also took notice, awarding her a pair of Grammys at the 2009 awards: best new artist and best pop vocal performance (for London ode “Hometown Glory”). 

Still, nothing could have prepared fans for the breakthrough that was to come. “Rolling in the Deep” arrived in November 2010, and immediately signaled a raising of the stakes: While “Chasing Pavements” had been despairing in its heartache, “Deep” mixed that anguish with tension, fury and outright vengefulness, supported by a taut, stomping folk-soul groove (helmed by producer and co-writer Paul Epworth) that made the song incendiary from Adele’s first “There’s a fire…” insistence. Peaking with a frayed, chorus-introducing vocal hook (“We could have had it AAA-ALLLLLL…..”) that hit as hard as any EDM beat drop of the time, “Rolling” quickly proved Adele’s most undeniable single yet, reaching the Hot 100 before 2010’s end and topping the chart the next May. “Deep” made for a stark contrast with the No. 1s on either side of its run, by turbo-pop artists Katy Perry, Pitbull and LMFAO, but it also had enough of a pulse and a vitality to it that it didn’t feel totally out of place among those hits, either. 

The late-cycle momentum of 19, the growing popularity of “Deep,” and strong pre-release buzz over its heart-rending lyrics and expanded musical palette all helped Adele’s second album, the stunning 21, bow atop the Billboard 200 with a very strong 352,000 in first-week sales. But more impressive than its debut was its endurance: The album would enjoy eight separate reigns at No. 1 over the course of 2011, totaling 13 weeks in all, and remained in the top five for its first 39 weeks on the chart. Over the course of that 2011 run, the album also produced a second smash in the tear-jerking power ballad “Someone Like You,” which followed “Deep” to No. 1 on the Hot 100 – the first No. 1 in the chart’s history to feature no instrumentation beyond voice and piano – after a spellbinding performance at that year’s MTV Video Music Awards. By year’s end, the album had sold 5.8 million copies, enough to help boost the entire industry’s year-over-year sales numbers into the positives for the first time since 2004. 

While enormously impressive, the numbers only capture part of the cultural impact of 21 in 2011. The album and its singles became such obvious shorthand for heartbreak music that it was featured in an SNL sketch where various cast members (and guests Emma Stone and Coldplay) play co-workers enjoying a cathartic cry together over various life sadnesses to “Someone Like You.” Meanwhile, countless other artists – contemporary hitmakers and legends alike, from all over the musical spectrum – were inspired to try their hands at Adele’s new entries to the all-time pop canon; in that year alone, “Deep” was covered or remixed by John Legend, Patti Smith, Linkin Park, the Glee Cast, Mike Posner, Jamie xx, a teenage Ariana Grande, Lil Wayne and dozens more. That cross-demographic, cross-generational appeal was a huge key to Adele’s success; while Lady Gaga and Drake might’ve enraptured as many teens at the time, Adele was the classic pop star you could listen to with your parents, or even your grandparents.  

By 2012, 21 was still showing no signs of slowing down. The set spun off a third Hot 100 No. 1 single in the betrayal anthem “Set Fire to the Rain,” which topped the chart in February – just a week before Adele would perform at that year’s Grammys, her first live appearance since emergency throat surgery forced her to cut her Adele Live Tour short the prior October. Unsurprisingly, she also cleaned up at the awards, winning in all six of the categories in which she was nominated, including album of the year for 21 and song and record of the year for “Deep.” Meanwhile, 21 had resumed its domination of the Billboard 200, topping the chart for another 10 weeks from January to March, with an extra 11th week in June bringing its two-year total to 24 weeks at No. 1 – tying Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain for the longest stay atop the 200 since Michael Jackson’s Thriller spent a historic 37 weeks there in the early ‘80s. In November 2012, the set was also certified Diamond by the RIAA, the first new album to officially break eight digits in units shipped since Usher’s 2004 blockbuster Confessions. 

Adele’s victory-lapping 2012 extended to one more musical release – the Bond theme “Skyfall,” which debuted in the Hot 100’s top 10 and would win Adele a best original song Oscar the following year – and another relatively minor hit off 21 in the No. 16-peaking “Rumour Has It.” And then, Adele headed back to the sidelines: While other pop stars of the era would keep at least one foot in the spotlight in between album cycles – with one-off singles, feature appearances, late-night and festival performances and/or consistent social media presence – Adele established the precedent in her post-21 era of a more-or-less full mainstream retreat when she was no longer in album mode. For most of 2013 and 2014, Adele was rarely seen or heard from, as she eventually set to work on the album that would become 21’s follow-up. 

By the time Adele returned in late 2015, anticipation for her new music had crescendoed to an arguably unmatched pitch among 21st century releases. Her approval rating was near-unanimous among pop fans of all stripes, and while other U.K. singer-songwriters with big voices and big choruses (Sam Smith, Emeli Sandé, Labrinth) had emerged in her absence, none quite matched her raw power or all-consuming appeal, artistically or commercially. Luckily, the song that she returned with met all expectations: “Hello,” the yearning megaballad that was to serve as lead single for her then-upcoming third album, was not the artistic leap forward that “Deep” was, but it scratched the itch Adele had left her fans with: It was massive, it was cathartic, it was deeply satisfying and it was instantly unforgettable. Helped by a dramatic black-and-white music video (and a newly glammed-out look for its singer), “Hello” debuted atop the Hot 100 and stayed there for 10 weeks. 

Halfway through that run, the entirety of 25 was released. Coming off the absurd sales performance of 21 and the stellar reception to “Hello,” commercial expectations for the set were exceptionally high – and though by late 2015, streaming had largely been accepted as the now-dominant form of global musical consumption, 25 was held from DSPs in its first weeks to ensure maximum performance. That maximum performance was reached, and then exceeded, and then exceeded some more: By the end of its first week, 25 had sold 3.38 million copies. 

That 3.38 million number was so inconceivably gargantuan that it practically defied being put in context; you had to go to sports-world records like Barry Bonds’ 73 homers in one season or Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points in a single game to express just how brain-scramblingly far ahead of the pack it was. Not only did it beat the previous single-week record-holder – *NSYNC’s 2000 blockbuster No Strings Attached, which sold an unrivaled-for-15-years 2.4 million in its debut frame – it passed it within the first three days of its release, and then essentially added on an extra million for its troubles before week’s end. The record has gone unmatched in the nine years since 25’s debut; even Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, coming off perhaps the biggest year any pop star has had this century, with the benefit of 31 tracks’ worth of streaming consumption and untold numbers of vinyl variants for purchase, topped out at 2.6 million – an impossibly high number for literally any other artist in all of pop history, but still not even a full week’s work for mid-2010s Adele.

Adele

Courtesy

The debut was beyond historic, and 25 spent the next six weeks at No. 1 – moving another seven-digits’ worth in two of those frames – before adding another three weeks atop the chart to its tally in February and March 2016. But while 21 essentially ruled the world for a full two calendar years, the cultural reign of 25 was shorter; wistful second single “When We Were Young” stalled at No. 14 on the Hot 100, and while the more upbeat third single “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” reached No. 8, it would be the only song from the set to follow “Hello” to the top 10. The album was still certified Diamond that September – after just nine months of release – and Adele again swept album, record and song of the year at the 2017 Grammys, where she also performed a heartfelt tribute to the late George Michael. But for the first time in her career, Adele was ending an album era with less momentum than she started. 

Following the 2017 Grammys, Adele once again disappeared from the public eye, staying out of sight for most of the decade’s remainder. In 2021, she began to tease a return with new album 30, announcing a November release date for lead single “Easy on Me.” The song – another classic Adele piano ballad – debuted atop the Hot 100 and ultimately matched the 10-week No. 1 run of “Hello.” 30 arrived a month later and spent its first six weeks of release at No. 1, attracting some of the strongest initial reviews of her career. But this time neither the album’s debut nor its endurance would match its predecessor; the album entered with 839,000 first-week units, still easily the best number of any album that calendar year, but not even a quarter of 25’s stratospheric bow. When 30 also struggled to produce an enduring hit beyond its lead single, it seemed to confirm that Adele’s period as a one-of-one commercial force had likely passed. 

Adele

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Nevertheless, Adele remains one of pop music’s top draws, both on record and in concert – with her Weekends With Adele residency at the Colosseum in Las Vegas attracting rave reviews and spending a full two years (from 2022-24) as one of the hottest tickets in live entertainment. While Adele’s presence in her hit songs and albums is most associated with melodrama, introspection and general seriousness, she’s managed to amass and retain a great amount of good will as a public figure by being a down-to-earth, cheeky and often downright hilarious presence in her live appearances – in 2020, she even surprised fans by signing on as a non-performing SNL host, in a well-received turn. The famously album-inspiring romantic turmoil of her personal life has also taken a turn for the less-dramatic in recent years, as she’s been linked with sports super-agent Rich Paul since 2021, revealing their engagement in August.

While Adele will likely never again be as culturally central a figure as she was when she rose from the shadows in the early 2010s to cast her own shadow over the rest of popular music, it’s equally unlikely that she will ever totally fade from the mainstream – she’s too good, too likable and too impossible to replace. And she remains a valuable reminder that while some pop greats seem like they’re destined to rule the world from the opening seconds of their first single or video, it can be even more rewarding when an artist who seems to come from humble roots quickly flowers into an icon, striking a chord entirely of their own thanks to serendipitous timing, impeccable artistry and unquestionably all-time pop songs. 

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back next Thursday as we reveal our No. 9 artist!

THE LIST SO FAR:

Honorable Mentions

25. Katy Perry24. Ed Sheeran23. Bad Bunny22. One Direction21. Lil Wayne20. Bruno Mars19. BTS18. The Weeknd17. Shakira16. Jay-Z15. Miley Cyrus14. Justin Timberlake13. Nicki Minaj12. Eminem11. Usher

On this week’s (Oct. 11) episode of the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century podcast, we finish off the bottom 15 of our list with a pop icon so legendary you can identify him by one letter — and then a quick look back at those Nos. 25-11 artists, with help from a special […]