Billboard Names Beyoncé The Greatest Pop Star Of The 21st Century

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. 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. 

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