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Billboard Staff’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2024: No. 7 — Beyoncé

Beyoncé is one of our Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 for how she continues to raise the bar for all of pop stardom.

As fans raced to DSPs to confirm the rumors of new music that they were seeing on their social media feeds – likely ignoring whatever was transpiring between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers following their game’s resumption – it appeared that the artist who first stopped the world with that digital drop way back in late 2013 had done it again. Even before the LP’s release, in the weeks after the surprise drop of “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” you could already see big bumps for other Black artists in country music – including for eventual Cowboy collaborator Tanner Adell, whose streaming numbers nearly tripled in the days that followed – just based on the conversation that she was creating around the topic. She’s not likely to disappear anytime soon, either, as she already has her much-anticipated return to the live stage on the books for halftime of the Houston Texans’ Netflix Christmas game against the Baltimore Ravens, with a possible Cowboy Carter tour expected to follow – and of course, there’s still the perpetually buzzed-about closing act to her archival album trilogy.

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