Best Pop Singers of 21st Century (No. 1)
With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard has spent the last 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 Beyoncé, our editorial staff’s pick for the No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of the 21st Century. While Taylor Swift is the century’s biggest pop star by the numbers — from album sales to streams to touring dominance — our editorial staff chose Beyoncé as our Greatest Pop Star of the Century, based on her full 25 years of influence, evolution and impact.
(Also, have fun reliving our staff’s list of Beyoncé’s 100 Greatest Pop Star Moments, and check out our recently rebuilt list of our picks for the Greatest Pop Star by Year from 1981 to 2023 — which we’ll be adding a 2024 edition to later this month.)
On March 18, 2000, Beyoncé Knowles topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time this century. She did so as a member of the pop&B quartet Destiny’s Child, who’d already scored a No. 1 on the chart in ‘99 with the scrub-taunting classic “Bills, Bills, Bills,” but this was one was even better: “Say My Name,” a phone-call argument blown out to a near-operatic melodrama, replete with sweeping staccato strings, panicked backing vocals and a beat that races on the pre-chorus like it just got some terrifying news. At the center of the futuristic (but TRL-ready) production’s anxiety attack was Beyoncé, cool and in control as she demanded the acknowledgment she knew she deserved: “You actin’ kinda shady/ Ain’t callin’ me baby/ Better say my name.”
On March 2, 2024, Beyoncé Knowles – who’d added a “-Carter” to her last name by that point – topped the Hot 100 for the 12th time this century. This time she did so solo, with “Texas Hold ‘Em,” a stomping, banjo-led hoot-along made for (and in tribute to) the dive bars and dancefloors of the South. The song was devised as the lead single to her acclaimed Cowboy Carter album, which featured Bey road-tripping through country music’s past, present and future – with navigation assistance from the genre’s living legends and rising stars – and “Hold ‘Em” invited fans along for the ride, as long as they came correct with it: “It’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedown/ Don’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor, now.”
It’s almost too perfectly illustrative of the kind of career that Beyoncé has had this past quarter-century that she should top the Hot 100 in the same month of both its first and last year, and with two such wildly disparate songs. There aren’t a lot of obvious threads tying together “Say My Name” and “Texas Hold ‘Em”; they’re from different genres and different generations (obviously), with virtually no overlapping collaborators, themes or even promotional techniques. The only thing they have in common – besides, of course, their fantastic commercial success and top-level artistry – is the singer behind them, a performer and creator whose commitment to innovation, evolution and all-around excellence has made her the bar against which all other pop stars this century have long been measured.
The greatness of Beyoncé as a pop star is both immediately obvious on its surface and worthy of extensive exploration in its vastness. You can watch her on stage for half a minute and instantly recognize that she’s an all-timer; her inherent combination of dazzling beauty, impeccable fashion, captivating staging, otherworldly physicality and simultaneously earthy and skyscraping vocals all speaks for itself. But to understand the full scope of her impact also requires a deep knowledge of 21st century American pop music and culture, and the ways in which she has dominated it, elevated it and transformed it over the past 25 years. Few artists this period can match her in any of the most critical basic categories of pop stardom – commercial success, performance abilities, critical acclaim and accolades, industry influence, iconic cultural moments – and absolutely no one can equal her in all of them. Even Taylor Swift, the lone artist who really challenged Beyoncé for the top spot on these rankings – and who does have a clear statistical lead on Bey in many key categories; more on that later – simply hasn’t been around for long enough to be able to match the expansiveness of her quarter-century of dominance.
And the most remarkable thing about the Houston-born superstar’s greatness is how consistent it’s been. She was still a teenager managed by her father when “Say My Name” hit No. 1; she was a 42-year-old married mother of three by the time “Texas Hold ‘Em” got there – and in between the two, there were precisely zero moments in which Beyoncé was not *BEYONCÉ*. There are no flop eras for Bey, no periods where she disappeared for a half-decade, no clear missteps that were not immediately and emphatically course-corrected. There are only varying degrees of winning for over two decades. In this sense, her closest peers this century are not other pop stars, they’re LeBron James and Serena Williams.
Blair Caldwell
Which isn’t to say there hasn’t been some drama for Beyoncé along the way. While the century started with her already rolling commercially – “Say My Name” debuted on the very last Hot 100 of 1999 – it also began on precarious footing for her group, who had just swapped out half its lineup. Fans found out about the lineup change when the “Name” video debuted in February 2000 with new members Farrah Franklin and Michelle Williams joining Bey and longtime friend Kelly Rowland in the clip in place of LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett, who’d both sung and written on the song, and who had accused Matthew Knowles – the group’s manager and Beyoncé’s father – of withholding profits. Just a few months later, Franklin departed as well, leaving the group a trio.
But while the turmoil in Destiny’s Child made headlines and stoked behind-the-scenes gossip, it hardly slowed down the group’s commercial momentum. If anything, it sped it up, as “Say My Name” was quickly followed by “Jumpin’ Jumpin’,” another top five Hot 100 hit whose frenzied hooks and appropriately pogoing beat pushed the group further to R&B’s crossover forefront. In a pop era ran by larger-than-life boy bands and female solo supernovas, Destiny’s Child was the rare girl group that could hold its own at the highest levels of turn-of-the-century top 40; the choruses were that massive, the production was that cutting-edge and, of course, Beyoncé herself was that magnetic a frontwoman.
The group also stood out from the pack in its projection of feminist strength; while many TRL-era starlets released moony-eyed ballads declaring devotion to their men, Destiny’s Child seemed far more comfortable singing about demanding more from them, or not needing them at all. (The group wouldn’t even release a straightforward love song as a single until its final album.) When “Independent Women Part 1” arrived on the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack, it made for the group’s first indelible pop culture moment: The song big-upped the hit film’s action star triumvirate of Lucy Liu, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz, but it was the group themselves who sounded like the baddest trio in the game. “Women” spent 11 weeks atop the Hot 100 from 2000-01, confirming the group as superstars.
“Independent Women” hadn’t even finished its chart run yet when “Survivor” was released as the title track and lead single from Destiny’s Child’s new LP, an inspired twist on public quipping about the group’s turnover being like the reality TV show of the same name. The group turned the joking into an anthem celebrating both the trio’s perseverance and continued classiness in the face of such mockery – because their mamas taught them better than that – and they proved that the best revenge is living well, as the single went to No. 2 on the Hot 100. Meanwhile, its parent album debuted atop the Billboard 200, with 663,000 copies sold – dwarfing the first-week numbers posted the prior decade by R&B crossover predecessors like Boyz II Men and TLC, demonstrating how massive DC had grown over its two-year winning streak of smash hits.
Survivor also saw Beyoncé taking a stronger hand in the group’s writing and producing; follow-up single “Bootylicious” was penned by the singer in response to criticism about her body image and ended up not only being the group’s fourth Hot 100 No. 1, but Bey’s first (and hardly last) time adding to the cultural lexicon. By the end of the album cycle, the group was already plotting solo releases for all three members, with Beyoncé’s obviously the most-anticipated: Not only was she the group’s most prominent singer and most visible member, but she’d increased her profile with a star turn as the titular femme fatale in MTV’s Bizet update Carmen: A Hip-Hopera, and with a supporting role as the Blaxploitation-riffing Foxy Cleopatra in Austin Powers in Goldmember.
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She would actually end up the last of the three to make her proper LP debut. Williams and Rowland released Heart to Yours and Simply Deep, respectively, in 2002 – while Rowland also guested on one of the year’s biggest hits, the sentimental Nelly duet “Dilemma.” Meanwhile, Beyoncé got off to a bit of a false start with Goldmember soundtrack single “Work It Out,” which paired her with ‘00s superproducers The Neptunes, but played to none of their strengths with its stilted ‘60s throwback groove and ultimately missed the Hot 100 entirely. Luckily for Bey, she had a hip-hop collab of her own to come before year’s end: “03 Bonnie & Clyde,” a top five Hot 100 hit that saw her convincingly riding shotgun alongside the biggest rapper in the game, Jay-Z, and which helped get her back on track commercially in time for her belated solo bow.
And when that proper solo launch arrived in May 2003, it was a no-doubter. Arriving on an exultant Chi-Lites horn sample and an addictive Rich Harrison-helmed bubble-funk groove, “Crazy in Love” was an obvious and immediate winner. Beyoncé glided perfectly over the verses before hitting an increasingly (and fittingly) unhinged pitch on the choruses, while an on-top-of-the-world Jay returned the favor to his “Bonnie” by playing hype man (“History in the making!”) on the song’s intro and delivering a perfectly timed guest verse, stoking continued rumors about the two of them being a real-life couple in the process. The song took over the summer of 2003, spending eight weeks atop the Hot 100 and ultimately coming to be considered one of the greatest pop songs of all time.
The hits kept coming from there: “Baby Boy,” a dancehall-oriented banger featuring a then-blazing Sean Paul, followed “Crazy” to No. 1 for another nine weeks that autumn, with the bent-not-broken ballad “Me, Myself & I” and the Donna Summer-lifting come-on “Naughty Girl” making it four top five hits in a row from the album for the newly minted solo superstar. All four smashes could be found on Dangerously in Love, which topped the Billboard 200 albums chart and won best contemporary R&B album at the 2004 Grammys – one of five awards Bey took home that night. The arguable highlight of her evening came apart from any of those wins, as she opened the awards alongside no less a pop and soul legend than Prince, holding her own next to the Purple One for a medley blending both of their hits, and demonstrating that the 22-year-old was already nearing the all-time pop pantheon’s inner circle.
As much recognition as Beyoncé was gaining for her hit singles and albums, she was becoming equally renowned for such performances, which also included spectacular debuts in 2003 at the MTV Video Music Awards and BET Awards. Those awards shows also of course celebrated her equally striking music videos, including a “Crazy in Love” clip that spawned three or four instantly iconic Beyoncé looks and a much-copied booty-pop dance to the “oh, oh” breakdown that also became an early signature. All together, Beyoncé was our staff’s Greatest Pop Star of 2003, defining pop superstardom in a post-peak-TRL era, and helping to move top 40 away from the Euro-based pop sounds of the turn of the century to something funkier and more hip-hop-based; the following year, the Hot 100 would be absolutely dominated by Black artists.
With her solo bonafides more than established, Bey would spend 2004 doing one more lap around the Billboard charts alongside Kelly and Michelle in Destiny’s Child. The group reunited for that year’s Destiny Fulfilled, which saw them embracing grittier sounds on hits like the marching band-led “Lose My Breath” and the trap-tinged “Soldier” (featuring then-ascendant southern rappers T.I. and Lil Wayne), and playing devoted domestic partners for the first time on the lush “Cater 2 U.” The trio’s expanded palette on the set met with positive reception from fans and a No. 2 debut on the Billboard 200 – though even in its title, Destiny Fulfilled seemed to be telegraphing that the LP would be the group’s swan song. And despite occasional reunions for live performances or one-off releases in the decades since, DC has yet to record its followup.
As she was becoming one of the decade’s leading pop stars, Beyoncé was also setting her sights on proper film stardom. She notched another box office success with a supporting role in 2006’s Steve Martin-led remake of comedy classic The Pink Panther – also scoring her third Hot 100 No. 1 on the soundtrack with the Bun B- and Slim Thug-featuring, Swizz Beatz-produced “Check on It,” her most Houston-sounding hit to that point – and filming her first starring role in a theatrical release with the Bill Condon-directed adaptation of the famed Broadway musical Dreamgirls. The film was also a hit, with Beyoncé scoring a Golden Globe nomination for her role as Deena Jones, frontwoman of the fictional Dreams girl group. Bey would go on to play major roles that decade as Etta James in the Chess Records story Cadillac Records and as a threatened wife in the thriller Obsessed – though she never quite became an A-lister in film the way she was in music, and has mostly put acting on the backburner for the past 15 years.
While she was filming Dreamgirls, Beyoncé’s second solo album came together quickly, as she recorded for two weeks in relative secrecy with go-to producers like Harrison, Swizz and The Neptunes. The result was September 2006’s B’Day – largely inspired by her Dreamgirls music and character, and much rawer-sounding and more aggressive than her solo debut – which debuted at No. 1 with over half a million in first-week sales. The singles rollout wasn’t quite as bulletproof as Dangerously’s, with the “Crazy”-reminiscent “Deja Vu” (also featuring Jay-Z) topping out at No. 4 on the Hot 100 and the furious “Ring the Alarm” peaking just outside the top 10. But any worries about underperformance were put to bed by third single “Irreplaceable,” an acoustic mid-tempo kiss-off cooked up with Norwegian production duo Stargate and rising singer-songwriter Ne-Yo, which topped the Hot 100 for 10 weeks and spawned two of the year’s biggest pop quotables in “You must not know ‘bout me” and “To the left, to the left.”
Meanwhile, Beyoncé was beginning to scale up her albums, videos and live experiences. She released her first deluxe edition in April 2007, including her first hyped event duet in the new track “Beautiful Liar,” a No. 3-peaking collab with fellow global superstar Shakira. That release was accompanied by the new B’Day Video Anthology Album, which included visuals for 13 of the extended album’s tracks – showing an unusual commitment to the music video at a time when the medium was at a low in its cultural currency – which extended the album’s lifespan on MTV and BET and laid the groundwork for future full-length visual projects. Also that April, she set out on her first solo headlining world tour, backed by her all-female band Suga Mama, which drew strong sales and reviews and established Bey as a marquee touring act. After proving herself an A-level hitmaker, Beyoncé was now also becoming a standard-setter in all the other most important elements of pop stardom.
The next year, she returned with I Am… Sasha Fierce, signaling her loftier ambitions with the album’s dual-disc split (into I Am ballads and Sasha Fierce up-tempos) and its black-and-white color scheme. The pop-rock ballad “If I Were a Boy” was the first single and obvious focus track, a show-stopping vocal showcase for Beyoncé with a ruefully double-standard-bemoaning lyric and a gender-swapping, high-concept video. But audiences more quickly embraced the simultaneously released “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” a riotous girls’-night-out singalong with a moonbounce beat co-produced by ‘00s pop&B gold-spinners The-Dream and Tricky Stewart. The song had no real instrumental melody, but Beyoncé’s vocal hooks came so fast and furious that it still became one of the late-decade’s defining hits – helped by a low-budget, hyper-kinetically choreographed video that quickly infiltrated all corners of pop culture, recreated by everyone from Justin Timberlake on Saturday Night Live to Liza Minnelli in the Sex and the City 2 film.
Beyoncé also brought the video to the VMAs that September with her first of several all-time performances on the awards show, leading an army of dancers with unstoppable energy and jaw-dropping physicality. Unfortunately, her night was defined by Kanye West’s timeline-altering decision to storm the stage during Taylor Swift’s first career win (for “You Belong With Me”) to protest that “Single Ladies” should’ve taken the best female video trophy instead – while a mortified Bey watched helplessly from the crowd. Though the interruption defined the awards – and an entire moment in pop culture – Beyoncé was able to end the evening on a positive note, as she took the top prize of video of the year for “Ladies,” and then invited Swift on stage to get the celebratory moment that Kanye had previously overwhelmed, starting a career-long friendship between the two superstars. Meanwhile, “Ladies” and the ensuing stage crash both helped revive interest in the music video format and absolutely resuscitated the VMAs, both of which had been undergoing an identity crisis for years before.
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Beyoncé ended the first decade of the century at her highest level of esteem yet: I Am… earned her first Grammy nomination for album of the year at the 2010 awards, and she’d even sung Etta James’ “At Last” at President Obama’s Inaugural Ball as his and First Lady Michelle Obama’s first dance song in 2009. She began the ‘10s by taking her first year-long break from recording and performing – though she still snuck in an appearance in another game-changing video, with Lady Gaga on the surreal crime-musical odyssey “Telephone.” When she returned in 2011, it was to a top 40 world that had essentially gone into hyperdrive, with turbo-pop and EDM having taken over radio, and even many of her pop&B peers embracing propulsive beats and party-starting urgency.
But Beyoncé went the other way with it on 4, titled after her lucky number (and it being her fourth solo LP), and built mostly around a more meditative, adult R&B sound. Though the album became her fourth straight to debut atop the Billboard 200, the first two singles failed to really catch on in the new pop world: the Major Lazer-sampling lead single “Run the World (Girls)” proved a little too aggressive for top 40, while follow-up “Best Thing I Never Had” retread past ballad territory a bit too closely – and this time, there was no “Irreplaceable” or “Single Ladies” to save the day commercially. But later singles like the ecstatically explosive “Countdown” and the sublime ‘80s R&B throwback “Love on Top” caught on with fans and with critics, ending on a lot of year-end lists from publications who would’ve previously had little interest in non-globe-conquering Beyoncé singles.
The album ended up her lowest-selling to that point, and her only non-soundtrack solo release to date to not generate a top 10 Hot 100 hit. But it came off more like a conscious shift to a new phase of her stardom – which made sense for the then-30-year-old performer, who had just had her first child, Blue Ivy, with now-husband Jay-Z, and whose social circle included the couple living in the White House – than an outright commercial disappointment. A triumphant Super Bowl halftime performance in February 2013 re-confirmed her peerlessness as a performer and the unassailability of her catalog, while also further validating the 4 era with spellbinding renditions of “End of Time,” “Run the World” and an a cappella snippet of “Love on Top.” If Beyoncé had fully pivoted to grown-up R&B at that point and mostly stopped competing with the era’s other pop megastars for mainstream attention, it would have been understandable and unsurprising, and her legacy as an all-time great would’ve still been more than secure.
Instead, Beyoncé decided to reassert her sovereignty in a way no one could’ve predicted. In the earliest hours of Dec. 13, 2013 – after a long period of relative radio silence – a full self-titled Beyoncé album unexpectedly fell from the skies, debuting online with no prior announcement or promotion. The surprise set featured an impressive array of cutting-edge collaborators, including a pair of rising-star guest appearances from Drake and Frank Ocean, and another luvved-up Jay-Z collab on lead single “Drunk in Love.” It was Beyoncé’s most mature, most direct and most coherent full-length album to date – plus it debuted alongside its own full-length visual album, with videos for all 14 of its tracks. And no one knew a thing about any of it until the order link showed up on their social media timelines at 12:52 on a Friday morning.
It is near-impossible to overstate the importance of Beyoncé’s surprise drop. There was simply no precedent for an artist on or even near Bey’s level releasing any kind of secret musical project on an unsuspecting pop world – let alone one this good, let alone one with an incredibly sumptuous and enriching full-length visual accompaniment. Even rock greats Radiohead’s acclaimed In Rainbows, famously released as an industry-rocking pay-what-you-want digital album in 2007, was announced nine days in advance of its release; by contrast, fans had no reason to suspect a new Beyoncé LP was even an imminent proposition until it was already available for digital download. For such a thoroughly realized project by one of the most famous and followed artists in the world to have remained entirely shrouded in confidentiality until its moment of release was mind-boggling.
More significant than the tah-dah parlor trick aspect of Beyoncé’s self-titled reveal, though, was the message that the set – and its tremendous initial success, bowing at No. 1 with a then-solo-career-best 617,000 first-week units despite just three days of tracking-week availability – projected about the future of the album format. For most of the 21st century, star artists and their labels had resisted the technological advancements in the industry that had cut into traditional CD purchases – file-sharing, then iTunes, then streaming – in the hopes that they could somehow hold onto the model that had driven such incredible sales numbers in the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Beyoncé was the first album of its kind to fully embrace the new possibilities of the digital age, generating the most talk of any 2013 pop release by eschewing the stodginess of traditional months-long album rollouts for an approach that felt exponentially more timely, in a way that simply wouldn’t have been possible in the CD’s golden age. The album format, increasingly viewed by industry leaders as an inconvenient means to an end, was suddenly exciting again. It was arguably the single most pivotal moment in all of 21st-century pop music.
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And its industry impact was profound. The next year would see artists as big and wide-ranging as Skrillex, U2 and D’Angelo experimenting with the sneak-drop, and by 2016, the entire music calendar was seemingly built around such Event Releases: Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Rihanna’s Anti, Frank Ocean’s Endless and Blonde and Bey’s sister Solange’s A Seat at the Table all arrived that year with a mini-avalanche of buzz but little or no advance notice. In a flash, Beyoncé had reoriented a singles-driven pop market around the long-player, with an album that had to be consumed at once, whose hit singles even sounded much better in the context of the whole record. Reverberations of that transformation continue to be felt today, when stars like Bad Bunny and Charli XCX can command a year without a single traditional pop radio smash, but with albums that excite fans with their cohesive full packages and unconventional promotional rollouts.
And while the promotion for Beyoncé’s self-titled album didn’t begin until its actual late-2013 release, it continued well into 2014. She closed out the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour she’d been on since early 2013 with European dates that spring, before heading out just a few months later with hubby Jay-Z on the On the Run co-headlining trek, taking her to stadiums for the first time. A couple of months later, she dropped the Nicki Minaj-featuring remix to Beyoncé highlight “Flawless,” an internet-stopping release whose lack of an official streaming or digital release until the set’s “Platinum Edition” reissue at year’s end meant its chart position never reflected its massive cultural import – though that edition did spawn a medium-sized chart hit in the No. 13-peaking “7/11,” which also became a fan favorite for its rambunctious hotel-set music video.
Beyoncé commemorated the era with her Video Vanguard performance at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, rejecting the traditional hits medley performance that has come to accompany the award in favor of an awe-inspiring 16-minute run through all 14 of the self-titled’s original tracks. That mini-set peaked with a performance of the original “Flawless,” which saw Bey standing in front of lingering “FEMINIST” text on the screen behind her – quoted from a mid-song sample of a speech on the word’s meaning by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – becoming a signature image of mid-’10s pop culture, and a significant moment in the advancement of gender discourse in pop music and culture. For the total of her accomplishments and her centrality to that year’s pop music – even in releases she wasn’t directly involved in – we named Beyoncé the Greatest Pop Star of 2014, making her the only two-time winner of the yearly honor to space out her two Ws a decade apart. The Queen was once again the Queen.
Though the year was full of major victories for Beyoncé, she was also involved in another three-star drama in which she was again the onlooker. That May, TMZ posted silent security footage from a Manhattan hotel in which Bey, Jay-Z and Solange entered an elevator following a Met Gala after-party, and Solange furiously attacked Jay for unclear reasons, before being restrained by a security guard. Rumors would fly that the incident had to do with an incident of Jay-Z proving unfaithful to his superstar wife, and though Bey largely dismissed the mess on the “Flawless” remix (“Of course sometimes s–t goes down when there’s a billion dollars on an elevator”), memory of it stuck as a notable moment of messiness for the usually tidy cultural dominance of the Knowles-Carter clan.
Catharsis would come in 2016, as Beyoncé would respond to both the endless gossip and the entire Year of the Event Release with her sixth solo album Lemonade. But first, the set was preceded in February by the release of her booming, catchphrase-strewn “Formation” single as an exclusive to then-new streaming service TIDAL, though the video received even more attention than the song for its innovative staging and choreography, its New Orleans-evocative (though Pasadena-shot) setting and Black Lives Matter-inspired imagery. (The latter part would end up getting serious backlash – and an eventual boycott – from conservatives and cops who felt her message to be anti-police; Bey responded by selling #BoycottBeyonce merch.) Bey would bring the song to the Super Bowl 50 halftime show the next day, during a set ostensibly headlined by Coldplay, and also announced the Formation World Tour in a commercial following the performance – the first-ever stadium tour to be headlined by a female artist, incredibly.
The positive response to “Formation” and its accompanying tour set the stage for Lemonade, which arrived with the year’s biggest release night, as it premiered in visual album format on HBO that April. The swaggering, roots-celebrating “Formation” turned out to be something of a red herring for the larger set, which instead focused on the singer-songwriter’s feelings of hurt, betrayal and anger in attempting to process a partner’s cheating – and her eventual forgiveness on the path to reconciliation – all largely assumed, of course, to be an autobiographical account of Jay-Z’s long-rumored infidelity. The album and accompanying film drew glowing reviews for its raw emotional content, its genre-hopping tracklist – which saw Bey collaborate with Jack White on the scuzzy “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” The Weeknd on the Isaac Hayes-sampling “6 Inch” and eventually even The Chicks on a live version of the stomping country warning “Daddy Lessons” – and its stunning coherence as her first true concept album. Largely considered her magnum opus today, and an enduring fan favorite for showing a more vulnerable side of the pop superhero, Lemonade cemented Beyoncé as one of the great albums artists of her generation.
Lemonade was also a resounding commercial success, posting 653,000 units in its first week and finishing at No. 4 on the 2016 Year-End Billboard 200. But for the second straight album, the chart peaks of the set’s hits were improperly reflective of their overall impact: the album being kept as a TIDAL exclusive during its original run depressed its streaming numbers, while top 40 radio – then largely fixated on the mid-tempo EDM-pop of The Chainsmokers and Justin Bieber’s Purpose era – mostly ignored the set, with the No. 10 bow of “Formation” proving the era’s highest chart peak. Still, visuals like Beyoncé lounging in a throne-like chair next to a twerking Serena Williams in the “Sorry” clip and wielding a baseball bat while strutting down the street in a yellow dress in “Hold Up” became unforgettable mid-’10s snapshot images, while lyrical hooks across the album like “He better call Becky with the good hair” and “I got hot sauce in my bag, swag” proved majorly memeable. Lemonade further proved that classic hit singles were no longer a prerequisite in 2010s pop for driving the culture: As Bey herself boasted in “Formation,” “You know you that b–ch when you cause all this conversation.”
Despite the album’s combination of unanimous critical praise and tremendous commercial and cultural success, one prize continued to elude Beyoncé: the album of the year Grammy. She had understandably lost on I Am… Sasha Fierce to Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Fearless, and more surprisingly took a backseat to alt-rocker Beck for his somber Morning Light in 2015, when Beyoncé was also nominated. (Kanye was captured approaching the Grammys stage after the latter snub, though he thankfully thought better of it that time.) Lemonade made her 0 for 3 in the category when the award instead went to Adele in 2017 – who, to be fair, had just sold a record 3.38 million units of her 25 album in one week. Nonetheless, many bemoaned Bey’s repeatedly being overlooked in the category, including Adele herself, who called Beyoncé “my artist of my life” and raved about Lemonade during her tearful acceptance speech.
Beyoncé took most of 2017 off after becoming pregnant with twins Rumi and Sir – with her Instagram posts first announcing her pregnancy and then sharing her first image with her newborns quickly becoming the first- and second-most liked posts in the app’s history at the time. She had been supposed to headline that year’s Coachella, but instead used the 2018 festival to make her return to live performance. With a later-stated desire to bring “our culture to Coachella,” Beyoncé’s debut at the festival – as the first Black female headliner in its 20 years – served as something of a history lesson through its depth of musical references, delivered with the help of a marching band and majorette dancers, in the HBCU tradition. The performance drew such a rapturous response – not just from those in attendance, but from millions around the globe live-streaming the much-anticipated performance – that Bey later released it as both a Netflix special and a live album (both titled Homecoming), with the latter reaching the Billboard 200’s top five and becoming one of the year’s top-reviewed releases.
At the turn of the decade, Beyoncé embarked on another ambitious multipart, multimedia project diving into the roots of her Blackness – this time honoring the artists and sounds of Africa, first with her album The Lion King: The Gift, a Bey-led soundtrack to the 2019 film remake of The Lion King in which she voiced Nala. She had been integrating explicitly African work into her work since 4, with legendary Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti and Mozambican dance group Tofo Tofo bearing on the music and choreography of “End of Time” and “Run the World.” But The Gift took it a step further in showcasing the artists themselves: Afrobeats and Afropop leading lights like Mr. Eazi, Burna Boy, Wizkid, Tiwa Savage and Yemi Alade all featured on the set. Most also appeared in Black Is King, the Bey-conceptualized accompanying 2020 Disney+ film, a sumptuous display of African-derived fashion, style, art and dance presented through the lens of a Lion King-esque story of a young African prince reclaiming his identity and his pride. The film drew minor blowback for some perceived “Wakandafication” of Africa, but far more praise for its staggering visuals and deeply felt connection to the continent portrayed.
Though her work in the back half of the 2010s established Beyoncé as both a top-flight visual storyteller and a committed conduit and explorer of Black culture within mainstream spaces – in ways that no other 21st century star had even attempted – her major pop moments were becoming a little fewer and farther between. But even though she had no huge crossover singles as a lead artist during the period, she still found her way onto such hits: In late 2017, she appeared on both a duet version of Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect,” boosting that song to No. 1 on the Hot 100, and a bilingual (and charity-minded) remix to J Balvin and Willy William’s “Mi Gente,” which shot the song to No. 3. In 2020, she also proved she could still hang with the next generation of Houston stars by blessing the remix to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage,” convincingly trading bars with the star MC and again rocketing the song to the Hot 100’s apex.
Though she had dropped a number of full-length projects in the meantime – including 2018’s Everything Is Love team-up with Jay-Z, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200, and closed the chapter on their moment of crisis as a couple – by 2022, Beyoncé still hadn’t released a proper solo follow-up to 2016’s Lemonade. That changed with the July unveiling of Renaissance, a planned first installment in a “three-act project,” with the first part meant to delve into the rich history of club music and ballroom culture. The set was inspired by Beyoncé’s late cousin (known to her as “Uncle Johnny”) who’d introduced her to much of the culture, and by a desire to celebrate the world going “back outside,” as she stated in lead single “Break My Soul,” following the societal shutdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
By 2022, fans thought they knew what to expect from a Beyoncé new album rollout: a surprise release with no advance singles or promotion, ultimately paired with a full-length visual accompaniment. This time, she swerved again by returning to a more traditional approach: Renaissance was publicized over a month in advance in a Vogue June cover story, with “Break My Soul” announced and then released as an advance single less than a week later. The album arrived in July to yet more rave reviews and another bow atop the Billboard 200, with critics and fans delighting in the set’s DJ set-like pacing and structuring, its boundless dancefloor energy and its deep web of cultural and musical references. “Soul” also topped the Hot 100, and second single “Cuff It” became Bey’s first proper solo smash of the TikTok era, as the ebullient disco-pop jam (with writing from genre legend Nile Rodgers) went viral over the course of late 2022 and early 2023, ultimately becoming the longest-running Hot 100 solo hit of her career.
As of mid-2023, much to its surprise, the Bey Hive still hadn’t gotten the expected visual accompaniment to Renaissance. What they got was something better: the Renaissance World Tour, Bey’s wildly successful first post-pandemic global trek, which saw her performing the new album in its entirety, while also integrating myriad other catalog jams into its club-like flow. Thanks again to TikTok and other social media, the tour made headlines at virtually every stop, as fans and outlets noted outfit changes, tweaks to lyrics (“Badu Badu Badu Badu”) and celebrity attendees, while daughter Blue Ivy – by then a Grammy winner for her appearance on The Gift’s “Brown Skin Girl” – made her warmly received stage debut, dancing to “My Power” and “Black Parade” during the show. The “mute challenge,” a nightly moment in which the entire stadium was meant to hush upon Beyoncé’s “everybody on mute” delivery from “Energy,” also regularly went viral for its various successes and failures. By the end of it, fans had (mostly) stopped asking for the videos: “You are the visual, baby,” Bey told her Louisville crowd that July.
There would be no six-year wait for the Renaissance follow-up: A Verizon commercial airing during the 2024 Super Bowl trumpeted Beyoncé’s return in February, with “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” debuting that night as the first tastes of Cowboy Carter, Bey’s long-rumored full-length country exploration. Though she would soon clarify, “This ain’t a country album. This is a BEYONCÉ album,” she hinted heavily that the LP was inspired by her “Daddy Lessons” performance alongside the Chicks at the 2016 CMA Awards, which met huge praise, but also some backlash criticizing her inclusion at the ceremonies. The full album was a rip-roaring journey through the genre’s history and how Beyoncé saw herself fitting into (and out of) it, and another chart-topping success. The biggest pop impact of Cowboy Carter, however, came from guest artist Shaboozey, who springboarded from his two appearances into crossover stardom with his record-tying 19-week Hot 100 No. 1 “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” neatly demonstrating how Beyoncé currently stands as the most important link between pop’s past and its future.
The longevity of Beyoncé remains continually awe-inspiring. In 2023, a full 20 years after her first year of being awarded Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star status, she finished No. 3 in our yearly ranking: an endurance at pop’s forefront that not even solo Michael Jackson, our Greatest Pop Star of 1983 and Bey’s closest 20th-century predecessor, can rightly claim. At a time when most of her pop peers – even the best ones – have either retired from music, faded from the limelight or simply contented themselves with recreating past glories, Beyoncé remains steadfastly committed to pushing forward. She does not chase trends or youth; even when collaborating with newer artists, she is able to meet them on common ground that does not result in either party being compromised or contorted. Instead, she chases greatness: fully realized artistic works that will add not only to her legacy, but to the culture and to the history of popular music.
It is not a coincidence that in the past three years, discussion of pop music at its highest levels of success and achievement has often boiled down to a discussion of two artists: Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. Partly this is due to a quirk of synched-up scheduling: Both pop icons released much-anticipated new albums in the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2024, and went on globe-conquering world tours (with box office-besting film accompaniments) in between them. Partly this is due to their real-life friendship, with both attending each other’s film premieres in 2023 and continuing to support one other even as they are invariably pitted against each other (even incidentally, as on lists like this one). But largely, it is because over those years, Taylor has reached the level of pop star greatness – with the industry-shaking impact of her Taylor’s Version re-recordings and her Eras Tour, with the tremendous commercial achievements of Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department, with her unprecedented overall cultural ubiquity – that previously, only Beyoncé could really lay claim to over the past 25 years.
If you go by the sheer numbers, Taylor would easily top this list — and she will undoubtedly reign on many of the chart-based quarter-century rankings we’ll publish in 2025. Even with her late start, she has more No. 1 albums and as many No. 1 singles this century as Beyoncé. More pressingly, the statistical heights she’s reached are ones neither Bey nor any other artist this century can equal. She has seven million-selling first weeks, including for both 1989 *and* 1989 (Taylor’s Version), as well as an unthinkable 2.61 million for this year’s Poets; Bey has never moved a million units in a week. Poets and Cowboy Carter are both up for album of the year at the 2025 Grammys, but despite Beyoncé now being the most awarded artist in the show’s history, Taylor is going for her record-extending fifth AOTY win and Bey still her first. The Eras Tour numbers have not yet been officially reported to Billboard Boxscore, but the final grosses are expected to dwarf not only the Renaissance World Tour, but every other tour in music history. In 2023, when Beyoncé was our staff’s No. 3 Greatest Pop Star, our No. 1 was Taylor Swift – her third win, the only artist with that many – and the gap between her and the rest of the pack was the biggest it’s been in the history of this project. There is zero question who the biggest pop star in the world is right now, and anyone who wanted to make the case for her as the century’s greatest would have a fair and reasonable argument with which to do so.
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But when you’re talking about greatness, and when you’re talking about greatness for the 21st century specifically, no one has a longer or fuller track record than Beyoncé. It is insanely impressive that Taylor has even made it a discussion after missing the whole first quarter of the period, but only Beyoncé has spent the entirety of the last 25 years exemplifying greatness in every form imaginable. With every album, every single, every music video, every live performance, every photo shoot and promo campaign and release strategy over the last quarter-century, she has pursued excellence thoroughly and relentlessly, and the number of times where she’s notably fallen short in that pursuit doesn’t even approach double digits. Her greatness is so wide-ranging and expansive that we just ranked the 100 moments this century that best display it, and we still had another 50-plus in reserve that it broke our hearts to have to leave on the cutting room floor. There’s just no other artist this century – and maybe only a couple in the previous one – with a full 20-plus-year catalog of great moments like that.
Again, it’s hard not to draw the parallel with someone like LeBron James: Yes, as he ages into his 40s, players have passed and will continue to pass him in terms of their real-time accomplishments. But as long as LeBron is playing at an extremely high level, he will be considered and treated as the greatest – particularly by other players – for the breadth of who he is and what he’s consistently done in the sport for decades now. Similarly, Beyoncé simply remains the standard for pop stardom this century, especially for those who came of age with her greatness as a given; ask the other 24 pop stars on this list who the greatest pop star of the century is and it would be surprising if she was not the answer for the majority of them. She’s been *BEYONCÉ* for 25 years now, and as she continues to challenge herself (and by extension, the rest of the pop world) to find new and different ways to be define greatness, it doesn’t seem like she’s going to stop being *BEYONCÉ* anytime soon. Better say her name.
THE COMPLETE LIST:
Honorable Mentions
25. Katy Perry
24. Ed Sheeran
23. Bad Bunny
22. One Direction
21. Lil Wayne
20. Bruno Mars
19. BTS
18. The Weeknd
17. Shakira
16. Jay-Z
15. Miley Cyrus
14. Justin Timberlake
13. Nicki Minaj
12. Eminem
11. Usher
10. Adele
9. Ariana Grande
8. Justin Bieber
7. Kanye West
6. Britney Spears
5. Lady Gaga
4. Drake
3. Rihanna
2. Taylor Swift
1. Beyoncé
