Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2019: Ariana Grande

(In 2019, the Billboard staff updated our originally 2018-released list project, which selected a Greatest Pop Star of every year going back to 1981. Read our entry below on why Ariana Grande was our Greatest Pop Star of 2019 — with our ’19 Honorable Mention runner-ups, Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year pop stars at the bottom — and find the rest of our picks for every year up to present day here.)

For a while, Ariana Grande did everything by the book. She worked with the biggest and best producers (Babyface, Max Martin) to create radio-friendly singles (she had eight top 10 tracks on the Hot 100 pre-Sweetener) that featured the right of-the-moment guest stars (Mac Miller, Iggy Azalea, Nicki Minaj) and showcased her superlative voice. But she was stuck in top-tier pop limbo: big enough for an insatiable, powerful army of fans, but not quite big enough to claim ubiquity — much less coolness.

Then she released Sweetener in 2018: the bubbly, optimistic response to both surviving a terrorist attack on her Manchester concert and getting engaged to SNL star Pete Davidson. The shift in her sound from top 40-oriented pop to eclectic, glitchy (via Pharrell) R&B — plus the album’s clear message of resilience — was enough to push her fully into the critical and popular mainstream. But just when Grande seemed on track to finally graduate out of pop princess-dom, she was hit (along with the rest of the music world) by another tragedy, when Mac Miller, her close friend, collaborator and ex, died from an overdose. She and Davidson split not long after. 

Despite the fact that she was just a couple months removed from Sweetener, Grande elected to give the people what they wanted — some reaction to the turmoil in her personal life — in a form they never expected: a surprise-released, baldly confessional, irresistibly catchy single called “Thank U, Next.” That song, with its bouncy, call-and-response chorus and tabloid-inciting namechecks of Grande’s famous exes, became her first Hot 100 No. 1 that November — and would still rule that chart when 2019 began. 

Just because Grande started 2019 at the top of the Hot 100 didn’t necessarily she would end the year as its defining pop star. But then she released her tour de force album, also called Thank U, Next — a project that drove home the fact that she had finally won over both critics and, well, everyone. As Next garnered near-universal critical endorsement, Grande cornered the top 3 spots on the Hot 100 with “7 Rings,” “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored” and “Thank U, Next” — the first artist to wrangle the top three on the chart simultaneously since The Beatles nearly half a century earlier.

In essence, she’d turned lemons into a multi-platinum pitcher of lemonade. Her previously announced Sweetener World Tour expanded from 59 arena dates to 101, mostly sold out to tens of thousands of screaming fans who were then documented on her live album, K, Bye For Now — released the day after the tour’s late-2019 finale at the Forum in Los Angeles. Grande had grabbed the reins, eschewing the conventional release schedules and promo tours she’d hewn to for most of her career — instead, she was releasing music more or less as she made it. Finally, the spontaneity and reactiveness that had long been de rigueur in hip-hop was working for a star used to the set schedule of the pop machine. 

After releasing two big albums in a six-month span, Grande refused to space out singles in a methodical way. Soon after her history-making run at the top of the Hot 100, she started ignoring the albums altogether, in favor of trading verses with 2 Chainz and Lizzo and sharing one-off tracks made with her closest collaborators to boost their careers (Victoria Monet’s “Monopoly” and Social House’s “Boyfriend”). She produced her first soundtrack for the Charlie’s Angels reboot, a star-studded affair that included the minor hit “Don’t Call Me Angel” with Lana Del Rey and Miley Cyrus. Somehow in between all of that, Grande sorted through live tracks for the album after her shows and shared that process with her tireless fans on social media, effectively balancing effortless pop star gloss with the more confessional, real-time pace that medium requires.

The K, Bye live album seemed like the cherry on top of a year that Grande had dedicated to showing her work. It hadn’t been enough to simply make good or even great pop songs, to be pretty and charming. So Grande put everything she had on the line, taking personal and musical risks, sharing more of herself than is really fair to expect of anyone — and it worked. It became impossible to ignore that she was not only a generational vocal talent, but a thoughtful, audacious, vulnerable artist wrapped up in pop star packaging. On K, Bye, you hear her voice soar, and then crack as she cries. It’s mostly exposed, not cloaked in reverb: just one more risk that Grande has the skill to make pay off. 

Honorable Mention: Post Malone (Hollywood’s Bleeding, “Sunflower,” “Circles”), Billie Eilish (When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, “Bad Guy,” “Everything I Wanted”), Lizzo (Cuz I Love You, “Truth Hurts,” “Good As Hell”)

Rookie of the Year: Lil Nas X

It’s always refreshing when, even as increasingly precise analytics and data shape the music industry, something truly surprising happens — in 2019, that something was the literally unprecedented mainstream success of a country-trap hybrid by a gay, Black artist. No one in 2018 would or could have guessed that a song called “Old Town Road,” comprised of a Nine Inch Nails sample and a truly spectacular hook, would become the longest-running Hot 100 No. 1 of all time. Perhaps most importantly, the song’s ascendance alongside the “yee-haw agenda” proved once again that hand-wringing about what constitutes real country is as futile as any other kind of genre orthodoxy.

Comeback of the Year: Jonas Brothers

The JoBros and their purity rings may have ridden out of the industry almost a decade ago as a punchline, but the potent combination of recent nostalgia and an album of unexpectedly solid jams  — aided by the successful side careers of Nick and Joe — made their return hit significantly harder than those of most aging boy bands. “Sucker,” the first single the group had released in six years, became their very first Hot 100 No. 1; the album, Happiness Begins, was 2019’s biggest debut until Taylor Swift dropped Lover. The Jonas Brothers may have gotten older, but people’s enthusiasm for bright, fun harmonies and massive pop hooks hasn’t changed a bit.

(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 2020 here, or head back to the full list here.)