Pop

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — having already revealed our Honorable Mentions, our Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all last week, and our No. 10, No. 9 and No. 8 Greatest Pop Stars earlier this week. Now, at No. 7, we remember the year in Beyoncé — who returned with one of the year’s most ambitious albums and change the game yet again.

“OK, they ready: Drop the new music.” 

It was a quintessentially Beyoncé moment, the kind that has come to define the last decade-plus of her continually bar-raising 21st century pop superstardom. Greeting TV viewers around the world during the most-watched event of the year – February’s Super Bowl – Beyoncé co-starred with Veep actor Tony Hale in a Verizon ad in which she kept attempting to literally break the internet, to no avail. At the very end of the spot, having still failed to break the internet – even as “the first woman to launch the first rocket for the first performance in space” – she instead broke character, issuing the above decree over her spaceship’s intercom. 

Lo and behold, two new songs magically appeared online immediately after: “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” presumed to be the first tastes of her upcoming album, the second part of the history-excavating trilogy project she kicked off in 2022 with the dance-oriented Renaissance. As fans raced to DSPs to confirm the rumors of new music that they were seeing on their social media feeds – likely ignoring whatever was transpiring between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers following their game’s resumption – it appeared that the artist who first stopped the world with that digital drop way back in late 2013 had done it again. You could practically hear the chuckling worldwide: Only Beyoncé. 

But the songs that fans first greeted as part of Bey’s new project were not like other Beyoncé lead singles. From the opening banjos and stomping beat of “Texas,” it was clear that the rumors that had long circulated about her new LP were at least partially grounded in reality: This was going to be her country album, reclaiming the genre’s roots in Black music.

Renaissance had done the same two years earlier with club music, but as a modern pop star, Beyoncé always had at least a toe or two in dance music – she’d topped Billboard’s Dance/Club Songs chart a whopping 22 times in her career already, with various singles and remixes, by the time of that album’s release. Her history in country, however, was largely limited to one song: “Daddy Lessons,” from 2016’s Lemonade. That song was well received by fans and critics, but proved controversial within the country world; following her performance of the song at the 2016 CMA Awards (alongside the now-also-divisive The Chicks), complaints from viewers about Bey’s country qualifications flooded social media, while genre stalwart Alan Jackson reportedly had gotten up and left during the performance.  

If there was any doubt that Beyoncé could have success within the genre, though, the two new songs – particularly the hooting, dancefloor-storming “Texas” – quickly put them to bed. “Texas” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 with just over four days of tracking in its initial release week; the following frame, helped by TikTok virality that included various line-dance challenges, the song climbed to pole position, becoming her ninth career No. 1 as a solo artist (and 13th including her work in Destiny’s Child). It also topped Hot Country Songs, making Bey the first Black woman to top the chart in its 65-year history. 

A month after, Bey announced the full parent album for the two songs, which would serve as “Act II” in the trilogy that Renaissance had kicked off: Cowboy Carter, whose cover featured Bey riding side-saddle on a white horse in full cowboy regalia, while brandishing an American flag. The album, the superstar explained in her Instagram reveal, had been “over five years in the making,” and was “born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t,” which inspired her to do a deep dive into country’s history – with the “experience” in question being assumed by most to be the 2016 CMAs performance. However, despite the project’s roots in country, Bey remained unequivocal on the album’s classification: “This ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.”

The new “Beyoncé” album arrived just a week and a half later: A 28-track journey through country’s past, present and future, Cowboy Carter was Bey’s highest-concept album yet, very deliberately paced and full of connective interludes and even paired at its bookends to essentially play in a continuous loop. It also had a guest list to match its simultaneously backwards- and forward-looking tracklist, including genre legends like Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Linda Martell, as well as rising artists like Willie Jones, Tanner Adell and Shaboozey, and even a couple lightly country-adjacent established pop stars in Miley Cyrus and Post Malone. But given the album’s explorations into both folkier and rockier territory, as well as with Bey’s usual inflections of pop and R&B across various tracks, it was true that the album’s core genre was not easily summarized by anything but the artist’s own name, now essentially a genre unto herself. 

The set was clearly an event, and it was received as one. Cowboy Carter bowed atop the Billboard 200 – continuing a streak of every official non-soundtrack LP of Bey’s topping the chart, dating back to her first 2003 solo turn Dangerously in Love – with 407,000 units moved, besting the 332,000 units posted by Renaissance in its first week and still marking the best non-Taylor Swift single-week performance for any 2024 album. What’s more, the set drew near-unanimous acclaim, with a score in the 90s from critic-aggregating website Metacritic, making it easily one of the best-reviewed sets released by any artist this year.

The biggest commercial returns for Cowboy Carter were largely kept to its first few weeks of release, as “Texas Hold ‘Em” began to slide down the Hot 100 after its two weeks on top – and though the set blanketed the chart following its debut, it failed to produce a second enduring chart hit. However, Bey remained present in the pop culture landscape following the album’s release, even officially introducing Team USA during the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies in July (with a pre-filmed bit set to Cowboy’s “Ya Ya”), and appearing in a Levis commercial – soundtracked, of course, by the album’s “Levii’s Jeans” – a couple months later. Even when Beyoncé didn’t appear somewhere, it made headlines, as at April’s Stagecoach Music Festival in California, where rumors flew that Bey would make a surprise cameo to kick off the live element of her Cowboy Carter era – sadly for naught, as the festival weekend came and went without the Queen making an official appearance.

Another arena where Beyoncé’s participation was continually anticipated this year was at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where presidential hopeful Kamala Harris was building excitement over her own somewhat surprise-announced candidacy. Harris used Lemonade’s “Freedom” as one of her campaign anthems, and in late August, reports surfaced that the pop icon would be making an appearance in support of the candidate. That didn’t come to pass, though Bey eventually would appear – alongside Destiny’s Child groupmate and fellow Texan Kelly Rowland – at a Lone Star State rally that October. “I’m not here as a celebrity… I’m not here as a politician,” she proclaimed. “I’m here as a mother. A mother who cares, deeply, about the world my children and all of our children live in… Our moment is right now. It’s time for America to sing a new song.” (Sadly, America ultimately elected to sing the same song as it did in 2016, but given the multitude of A-list endorsements Harris received – including from several other artists on this list – it suggested that the impact pop stars could have on such matters in 2024 was perhaps limited to begin with.) 

There was no doubt about the impact that Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter era had on popular music in 2024, however. Even before the LP’s release, in the weeks after the surprise drop of “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” you could already see big bumps for other Black artists in country music – including for eventual Cowboy collaborator Tanner Adell, whose streaming numbers nearly tripled in the days that followed – just based on the conversation that she was creating around the topic. And perhaps the two biggest breakthroughs in country music in 2024 could both be traced back to Bey: Post Malone, who soft-launched his country pivot on “Levii’s Jeans” before going full Nashville with his Hot 100-topping Morgan Wallen single teamup “I Had Some Help” and Billboard 200-topping full album F-1 Trillion, and Shaboozey, who made his Hot 100 bow via two tracks on Cowboy Carter right before besting the chart for a record-tying 19 weeks with his inescapable “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” 

A full quarter-century after first topping the Hot 100 with “Bills, Bills, Bills” as a member of Destiny’s Child, our editorial staff’s No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of the 21st Century remains not only basically as successful and impactful as she’s ever been, but more adventurous and risk-taking than ever. She is well on her way to being one of the culture-defining superstars of the 2020s, just as she was for the ‘00s and ‘10s; this is her third straight year in our Greatest Pop Stars top 10, with only one other artist (yet to appear on our 2024 rankings) able to boast an active streak as long. She’s not likely to disappear anytime soon, either, as she already has her much-anticipated return to the live stage on the books for halftime of the Houston Texans’ Netflix Christmas game against the Baltimore Ravens, with a possible Cowboy Carter tour expected to follow – and of course, there’s still the perpetually buzzed-about closing act to her archival album trilogy. You can bet that whenever she does plan on dropping that new music, we’ll be staying ready for it.

Check back tomorrow for our Nos. 6 and 5 Greatest Pop Stars, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — having already revealed our Honorable Mentions, our Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all last week, and our No. 10 and No. 9 Greatest Pop Star on Monday. Now, at No. 8, we remember the year in Post Malone — who resumed his old winning ways with a turn towards an entirely new genre.

When Post Malone rang in 2024 with an appropriately 24-song set at a Las Vegas New Year’s Eve concert, he pulled out his biggest hits – the ones that made him a superstar in the late 2010s by crisscrossing genre lines from hip-hop to rock to pop and beyond – including the Hot 100 No. 1s “Circles,” “Sunflower,” “Rockstar” and “Psycho.” But you had to look beyond the setlist for a forecast of what was to come this year. At Fontainebleau’s BleauLive Theater in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2024, the clearest sign of Post’s creative direction was twofold: his outfit choice of jorts, paired with a tank top, and the red Solo cup that rarely left his hand that night. Yes, Post was about to go country.

The Texas native had flirted with the genre in the past — making his Country Airplay debut on a posthumous duet version of Joe Diffie’s “Pickup Man” last year and performing the song alongside Morgan Wallen and HARDY at the 2023 CMA Awards. At those awards, Access Hollywood asked backstage if he had his own country project in the works and Post answered, “I think so…yes.”

The first true hint that said project was actually arriving in 2024 came in February, when Post shared a snippet of a Luke Combs collab that would become “Guy for That.” That was followed by a turn on Beyoncé’s own country project Cowboy Carter in March, with the twangy midtempo duet “Levii’s Jeans,” then a surprise Hank Williams cover at a benefit concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in April. But everything kicked into overdrive later that month at the Stagecoach Music Festival, when – following his own 11-song set of country covers, some including assists from the original artists themselves (Brad Paisley, Dwight Yoakam, Sara Evans) – Post popped back up onstage with headliner Morgan Wallen to debut a brand-new duet called “I Had Some Help.” From fan-shot videos of the Indio, California, performance, it hardly seemed like your typical new-song-at-a-festival response; by the second chorus, the crowd was singing every word as if the track had already been all over country radio.

And then it was. “I Had Some Help” officially arrived on May 10, and that cusp-of-summer release served it well, as the breezy bro duet went on to soundtrack countless pool parties and backyard barbecues, debuting at No. 1 on the Hot 100 in an incredibly crowded pop landscape (Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” were all in the top 10 that week) and holding the top spot for a robust six weeks. It also scored seven weeks at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs and four atop Country Airplay, on its way to being crowned Billboard’s 2024 Song of the Summer in September. The month-plus chart-topper ended a bit of a commercial cold spell for Posty, whose solo No. 1s had all come last decade and who hadn’t found a hit of this size since well before the pandemic.

But “Help” was just the start of Post’s country coup. In June, he announced that his first all-country album F-1 Trillion would arrive in mid-August – and released the second single from the project, a sudsy dive-bar duet with Blake Shelton called “Pour Me a Drink” that would become his second Country Airplay No. 1. In July, he unveiled the full track list, which included a who’s who of honky-tonk heavy-hitters. Only three songs on the 18-track standard album didn’t include features, and it appeared that everyone in Nashville – Dolly Parton, Hank Williams Jr., Tim McGraw, Chris Stapleton and (of course) Jelly Roll – was beyond happy to team up with the congenial hitmaker.

F-1 Trillion debuted atop the Billboard 200 following its Aug. 16 release and spent six weeks at No. 1 on Top Country Albums, with Post landing 18 songs on the Hot 100 from the project during release week. One of the many keys to the project’s colossal success appears to be the way Post fully immersed himself in the country world this year, between performing at both the ACM Awards in May and CMA Awards in November; playing Nashville’s vaunted Bluebird Café in June; and making his Grand Ole Opry debut in August, flanked by Vince Gill, John Michael Montgomery, Lainey Wilson and more country all-stars. He’s been utterly enveloped into what can sometimes be an insular space, proving yet again what a genre chameleon he can be when the musicianship, strong songwriting and love for the craft is so clearly there.

And this could have been a massive year for Post Malone even if he hadn’t successfully ingratiated himself into yet another new genre. Back in February, a day after Taylor Swift had surprise-announced a brand-new album called The Tortured Poets Department, she unveiled the project’s track list – including album opener “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone. It ended up not only being the opening track, but also the lead single, arriving alongside the album on April 19 with a cinematic black-and-white music video starring Swift and a tattoo-free Malone as ex-lovers. Post gushed about the experience on Instagram, writing, “It’s once in a lifetime that someone like @taylorswift comes into this world. I am floored by your heart and your mind, and I am beyond honored to have been asked to help you with your journey.” The song spent two weeks atop the Hot 100, and the duo accepted the video of the year prize together for “Fortnight” at September’s 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, where Malone was Swift’s right-hand man for her latest VMAs victory lap.

Malone’s awards journey might just be getting started too, because in November, he earned seven new Grammy nominations – a tie for the second-most this year – that span both his country album and his collabs with Swift and Beyoncé, and have him in good shape to finally take home his first-ever statue in 17 career tries. Next year will also mark Post’s biggest tour yet: After playing a 21-date mini-tour around F-1 Trillion this fall, the star announced the aptly titled Big Ass Stadium Tour in November, set for next April to July. 

Oh, and Post accidentally let a couple of other dates slip when he made the announcement, sharing a poster that included April 13 and 20 stops in Indio, California, with Coachella confirming the next day that Post would be back in the desert to headline alongside Lady Gaga, Green Day and Travis Scott next spring. After 2024 headlining slots at Bonnaroo, Rolling Loud, Governors Ball, Global Citizen Festival and Outside Lands that all skewed heavily toward his earlier, non-country material, it will be interesting to see what kind of similarity the Post Malone who shows up at Coachella will bear to the one who showed up at the same grounds for Stagecoach a year before.

Post Malone isn’t just diversifying when it comes to genre, either; he also made inroads in Hollywood this year, including a bloody boxer role in the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring Road House remake in March and a cheeky cameo as himself in the new Jack Black Christmas movie Dear Santa. In other big accomplishments: His 2018 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse smash “Sunflower” with Swae Lee became the first-ever double-diamond single in RIAA history in February, meaning it’s reached an equivalent of 20 million sales; that same month, he performed “America the Beautiful” ahead of the 2024 Super Bowl, which reached a record 123.7 million viewers; and he came face-to-face with his very own wax figure backstage at Gov Ball in June (even mistaking it for a real person).

As Malone wraps his epic year by dotting 2024 best-of lists (including both our best albums and best songs staff rankings), his country project ends on a high, celebrating platinum certification from the RIAA for F-1 Trillion and five-times platinum status for “I Had Some Help,” as of Dec. 12. It once again seems like everything he touches turns to gold (or, really, platinum), so as Post’s 2024 turns to his 2025, keep your eyes peeled for any wardrobe clues that might signal which part of the top 40 world he has his sights on taking over next.

Check back later today for the reveal of our No. 7 Greatest Pop Star, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!