For the last three years at Billboard, our editorial staff has counted down its picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of the year, with full essays for everyone from No. 10 (Drake last year) to No. 1 (Taylor Swift last year), as well as bonus write-ups for our picks for Rookie and Comeback of the year, and even 10 close-but-not-quite honorable mentions. This December, we’re doing the same for our Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 — one of the most incredible years for pop stardom that any of us can remember living through.
We’ll be counting down our top 10 over the course of this week, with our top two being revealed the following Monday (Dec. 23). As we unveil all 10 of our picks via our individual essays — as well as our 10 runner-up honorable mentions, and our rookie and comeback artists of the year, all of which we revealed earlier this month — you can catch up on all of it here, as we update this list throughout the rollout with each of our newly announced pop star picks. (And if you missed any of our Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century rankings that we rolled out over the last few months, be sure to catch up on those as well — and listen to additional deep dives into each of the artists selected, and our process and reasoning behind their rankings, on our Greatest Pop Stars podcast here.)
And of course, we must once again remind everyone: unlike with our Year-End Charts, these Greatest Pop Stars rankings are not mathematically determined by stats like chart position, streams or sales numbers. Those all play a big part in our final calculations, of course — but so do things like music videos, live performances, overall virality and social media presence, and more intangible factors like cultural importance, industry influence and overall ubiquity. (And we measure this over the entire 2024 calendar, so if you were only heard from at the beginning or end of the year — or only had one big song or moment — that’s gonna matter in our evaluation of your 2024 pop stardom as well.)
Check out our honorable mentions, rookie and comeback of the year and updating top 10 below — and remember to check back on Dec. 23 for the announcement of our top two!
