In 2019, Billboard‘s staff revealed its picks for the greatest pop star of every year dating back to 1981 (the first year of MTV, essentially the birth of the modern pop era), with essays making the case for each as the biggest, brightest and most important star in their solar system that calendar year. After adding BTS as the greatest pop star for 2020, we decided to expand the project a little bit. For the last four years, we’ve counted down our picks for the 10 greatest pop stars of the year, with full essays for everyone from No. 10 (Jelly Roll in 2024) to No. 1 (Kendrick Lamar in 2024), 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.
And now, it’s finally time for our 2025 rankings. We’ll be counting down our top 10 over the course of the next two weeks, with essays and podcast discussions for each artist, and our top two being revealed on Friday, Jan. 30. But first, we’ve got our 10 honorable mentions for this year — as well as our rookie and comeback artists of the year, to be unveiled on Friday (Jan. 16). (If you missed any of our Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century rankings that we rolled out in late 2024, be sure to catch up on those as well.)
First, though: a reminder that unlike with our Year-End Charts, these Greatest Pop Stars are not mathematically determined by stats like chart position, streams or sales numbers. Those all play a big part in our final rankings, of course — but so do things like music videos, live performances and social media presence, and more intangible factors like cultural importance, industry influence and overall omnipresence. (And we measure this over the entire 2025 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 hurt your performance here as well.)
Read on below for our best-of-the-rest picks in alphabetical order, and for more discussion of these artists — as well as some of the artists it hurt us to leave off, and some of the artists we’re hoping to be more in the mix in the years to come — check out our Greatest Pop Stars podcast discussion here.
