Who Have Been the Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 So Far?

It’s midyear season at Billboard, with our 50 best albums and 50 best songs of the year so far going live earlier this week. Now that we’re about halfway through the 2025 calendar, it also seemed like a good time to look back on the year so far in pop stardom — who’s excelled, who’s disappointed, who’s been surprisingly invisible and who could still come back in a big way to define 2025 by year’s end.

On this week’s Greatest Pop Stars podcast, host Andrew Unterberger is joined by the three Billboard staffers (Kyle Denis, Meghan Mahar and Jason Lipshutz) who appeared back in January to participate in our first-ever Greatest Pop Stars Fantasy Draft, where the four of us each drafted our own teams of pop stars who we thought would go on to define 2025. In this episode, we each revisit our rosters, and size up how each of our pop stars has done so far — and also talk about who’s leading the 2025 race in general, and predict some artists who might still enter the discussion before year’s end.

Along the way, of course, we ask all the most important questions about the first six months in 2025 pop stardom: Why does 2025 still feel so much like an extension of 2024? Does the success of “Nokia” excuse drafting Drake over Kendrick Lamar? Where is Harry Styles? Did Bruno Mars secretly release his best song in a decade with a one-minute baile funk one-off no one seems to know about? Is Sabrina Carpenter coming back to run s–t? Is Cardi B? And perhaps most importantly — where does Benson Boone fit into all of this?

Check it out above, and subscribe to the Greatest Pop Stars podcast on Apple Music or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) for weekly discussions every Thursday about all things related to pop stardom!

And as we say in every one of these GPS podcast posts — if you have the time and money to spare, please consider donating to any of these causes in the fight for trans rights:

Transgender Law Center

Trans Lifeline

Gender-Affirming Care Fundraising on GoFundMe

Also, please consider giving your local congresspeople a call in support of trans rights, with contact information you can find on 5Calls.org.