Ask ten people who “owned” the past year in music and you’ll get ten answers, all correct in their own way. Charts splintered across genres, algorithms fed us wildly different playlists, and yet a small constellation of names kept surfacing—on festival posters, year-end lists, and endless TikTok edits.
Looking across the hardest data we have—global streaming tallies, year-end industry charts, TikTok reports and current monthly-listener numbers—one truth is impossible to dodge: Taylor Swift is still the center of pop’s gravity. But the story of the last twelve months is also about Latin hegemony, K-pop’s stamina, the rise of TikTok-supercharged newcomers, and regional giants who are bigger than many Western stars yet barely touch English-language headlines.
Here’s a journalist’s rundown of who actually counted as “most popular” this past year.
Taylor Swift: Pop’s First Five-Time Global Champion
Start with the obvious. In February 2025, the IFPI—the global trade body for recorded music—named Taylor Swift the Global Recording Artist of the Year for 2024, the fifth time she has taken that title since the award was created.IFPI+2Wikipedia+2 Her album The Tortured Poets Department didn’t just sell; it led IFPI’s global album charts across physical sales, vinyl, streaming, and overall units, with well over five million “equivalent” copies worldwide.reuters.com+1
Spotify’s own numbers tell a similar story. In Wrapped 2024, Swift was the platform’s most-streamed global artist for the second year in a row, racking up more than 26.6 billion streams.AP News+1 She also topped the service’s list of most-streamed artists worldwide, ahead of The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, Drake and Billie Eilish.Spotify+1 Billboard’s year-end charts had her in familiar territory as the top overall artist in both the U.S. and on its global tallies.Reddit+3Billboard+3Billboard+3
Those are not normal numbers; they’re evidence of a pop star functioning almost like a platform in her own right. The Eras Tour, the first concert tour to cross the billion-dollar revenue mark, kept feeding interest in older albums at the same time she was breaking streaming records with new material.reuters.com+1
If you’re trying to decide who was the most popular musician of the last year, the boring but honest answer is: Taylor Swift, by several different definitions at once.
The Streaming Super-League: The Weeknd, Drake, Bad Bunny & Co.
Popularity isn’t a one-woman show, though. Right behind Swift is a pack of acts who have turned streaming dominance into a permanent lifestyle.
The Weeknd has quietly become one of Spotify’s most reliable juggernauts. On services that track daily listeners, he sits at or near the top of the global list in late 2025, often above 120 million monthly listeners.Kworb+1 Spotify’s 2024 ranking put him second only to Swift in worldwide streams.Spotify
Drake remains streaming’s default setting. IFPI’s 2024 global artist chart lists him right behind Swift at No. 2, reflecting sustained demand across albums, singles, and endless collaborations.IFPI+1
Then there’s Bad Bunny, still the face of Latin trap and reggaeton to much of the world. He landed in the global top three on Spotify for 2024, proving that his run of dominance from the early 2020s was not a fluke.Spotify+1 In many Spanish-speaking markets he is less a star and more an ecosystem.
Rounding out this “super-league” are evergreen pop names like Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, and Kanye West, all of whom appeared in Spotify’s global top 10 for 2024.Spotify You don’t need to love any of them personally to acknowledge that when we talk about the most popular musicians on Earth right now, these are the recurring characters in the plot.
TikTok and the New Pop Vanguard: Sabrina Carpenter, Benson Boone & Friends
While legacy acts command the top of the bar charts, a younger wave is rewriting the rules of what “breakthrough” looks like.
Sabrina Carpenter is the clearest example. Her single “Espresso” became Spotify’s most-streamed song of 2024 globally, reportedly clearing 1.6 billion streams, and she followed it with another hit, “Feather,” that also lodged near the top of year-end tallies.AP News+1 TikTok crowned her its top U.S. artist for 2024, ahead of fellow algorithm natives like Ice Spice and NLE Choppa.Forbes+1
On IFPI’s 2024 global artist list, Carpenter appears at No. 10—astonishing for someone who spent much of the previous decade pigeonholed as a Disney alum.IFPI+1 Her album Short n’ Sweet also lands high on global streaming-album rankings, flanked by heavyweights like SZA and Morgan Wallen.IFPI+1
She’s not alone. TikTok’s own “Year on TikTok Music” report highlights Benson Boone, Artemas, and Myles Smith as 2024’s breakout beneficiaries of the platform’s algorithm, pushing them from bedroom playlists into charts and festival line-ups.Record of the Day+1 Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” eventually emerged as Billboard’s No. 1 song of the year in the U.S., a classic soul belter that started like so many modern hits: as a sound people used again and again on TikTok.Billboard+1
If Swift and The Weeknd represent a kind of streaming aristocracy, Carpenter and Boone are the new pop bourgeoisie: artists whose careers are intertwined with short-form video, where a few seconds of a chorus can be more powerful than any traditional radio campaign.
Country’s Streaming Era: Zach Bryan, Morgan Wallen and the Heartland Wave
Ten years ago, country music’s biggest stars were often invisible in global streaming conversations. That’s no longer the case.
Oklahoma-born Zach Bryan appears in IFPI’s 2024 global artist top 10, a rare feat for a country-leaning songwriter whose appeal has been built on long, wordy songs and understated performances.IFPI+1
Morgan Wallen, despite (and sometimes because of) controversy, has become a streaming juggernaut. His album One Thing at a Time ranks among the top streaming albums globally, and he shows up repeatedly on year-end Hot 100 and IFPI lists.IFPI+2IFPI+2
The Billboard Hot 100’s 2024 year-end rundown reads like a census of this “heartland pop” moment: songs by Wallen, Bryan, Jelly Roll, and Warren Zeiders nestle comfortably among dance-pop, rap, and Afrobeats.Wikipedia+1
Together they represent a subtle but important shift. For a global audience increasingly fed by playlists, “country” is no longer a siloed radio format; it’s a flavor that can sit next to Hozier, Sabrina Carpenter, or Kendrick Lamar without anyone blinking.
Latin Music: Karol G, Peso Pluma and a Global Movement
If there’s one region whose stars you underestimate at your own risk, it’s the Latin world.
Spotify Wrapped 2024 shows Latin artists woven throughout the global charts, and a separate analysis of the service’s data notes that Karol G was among the five most-streamed female artists on the platform worldwide that year—the only Latin act to crack that list.LatiNation+1 She also dominated global Latin album charts with Mañana Será Bonito, extending a run as Spotify’s most-listened-to female Latin artist for five consecutive years.¡HOLA!
On the male side, Bad Bunny still looms largest, but 2024 and 2025 also cemented the rise of Peso Pluma, whose corrido-tinted sound helped push regional Mexican music into the mainstream of both streaming and TikTok. Spotify lists him in its global top 10 artists for 2024, ahead of many Anglophone household names.Spotify+1
A 2025 radio ranking of Latin streaming heavyweights puts Bad Bunny at No. 1, followed by Shakira, J Balvin, Karol G and Daddy Yankee—proof that the bench is deep and the audience enormous.los40.us
Taken together, these numbers confirm what audiences already know intuitively: Latin music isn’t a niche anymore; it’s one of the main arteries of global pop.
K-Pop’s Second Wind: SEVENTEEN, Stray Kids, ENHYPEN & Rosé
Predictions of K-pop’s “decline” have been premature. While BTS’s group activities are on pause, the wider ecosystem is thriving.
IFPI’s 2024 global artist chart puts SEVENTEEN at No. 3 and Stray Kids at No. 5 worldwide, jostling for position with U.S. hip-hop and country acts.IFPI+1 ENHYPEN’s Romance: Untold ranks near the top of global album charts, demonstrating that new-generation groups are more than capable of filling stadiums and streaming columns.IFPI+1
On the visual front, K-pop continues to dominate YouTube; in September 2025, Rosé’s music video “APT.” became the fastest K-pop video ever to hit two billion views, doing it in under a year.The Times of India
Where Western pop stars often compete primarily on streams and tours, K-pop artists operate on several axes at once: album sales, streaming, touring, and fan-driven collectibles. When you fold all those metrics together, groups like SEVENTEEN and Stray Kids are unquestionably among the most popular musicians on Earth right now.
The Quiet Superstars: Arijit Singh and the Power of Regional Giants
Not every global titan headlines an American awards show.
On Spotify’s list of most-followed artists in late 2025, the top position doesn’t belong to Swift, Drake or The Weeknd. It belongs to Arijit Singh, an Indian playback singer who has become the default voice of modern Bollywood romance, with more than 160 million followers on the platform.Wikipedia+1
Further down the same list you’ll find another Indian stalwart, composer A.R. Rahman, and Pakistani-born Bollywood hitmaker Pritam rubbing shoulders with Coldplay, Rihanna and Adele.Wikipedia
These are artists whose primary audiences are in South Asia and the diaspora, but their follower counts rival or surpass many Western stars. They remind us that English-language charts only tell part of the story; if you zoom out, “most popular” becomes a very different map.
Virality as a Kingmaker: TikTok, YouTube and the Feedback Loop
The biggest structural story behind all these names is the rise of platforms that blur the line between “music discovery” and everything else you do on your phone.
TikTok’s 2024 Music Impact Report, released in early 2025, emphasizes just how central the app has become to chart success. The company claims the majority of U.S. No. 1 singles in 2024 were meaningfully driven by trends on TikTok, citing reggaeton hit “Gata Only” as its top global track of the year and noting that it generated tens of millions of user creations and well over a billion Spotify streams.TikTok Newsroom+2Music Business Worldwide+2
YouTube, for its part, remains the quiet giant of global music consumption. In 2025, K-pop visuals like “APT.” raced to multi-billion view counts faster than most casual listeners could keep up, while older videos—from Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” to a swarm of ’90s hits—crossed the one-billion mark thanks to renewed interest via TikTok edits and nostalgia waves.People.com+1
Put simply: the same forces that push Sabrina Carpenter’s chorus into your feed can send a 40-year-old Madonna deep cut back onto global charts, or catapult an unknown indie artist into the year-end Hot 100. Any serious list of “most popular musicians” in 2025 has to account not just for catalog size and marketing spend, but for the whims of short-form video.
So Who Really Were the Most Popular Musicians of the Year?
If you force the question into a single answer, data points in one direction: Taylor Swift. She tops the IFPI global artist chart, Spotify’s 2024 global ranking, and Billboard’s year-end artist lists, while fielding a tour that rewrote the business of live music.reuters.com+3IFPI+3AP News+3
But popularity is a hydra. Depending on where you stand, the face of the year might have been:
- The Weeknd, riding a wave of monthly listeners no one else can match.Kworb+1
- Bad Bunny or Karol G, if you’re living in the gravitational pull of Latin music.Spotify+2¡HOLA!+2
- Sabrina Carpenter, if your world is measured in TikTok trends and global pop hooks.AP News+2Forbes+2
- Zach Bryan or Morgan Wallen, if your playlists lean country.IFPI+2IFPI+2
- SEVENTEEN, Stray Kids or Rosé, if you measure fandom in lightsticks and streaming parties.IFPI+2IFPI+2
- Or Arijit Singh, if you spend your commute in the emotional weather system of Bollywood ballads.Wikipedia+1
What unites them isn’t genre, language, or even approach to fame. It’s the fact that they’ve all learned to live inside the new reality of music consumption: a world where charts are global, virality is chaotic, and the biggest hits often begin life as 15-second fragments on a screen you scroll without thinking.
The past year didn’t belong to just one musician. It belonged to a handful of artists who figured out how to surf that chaos—and to the audiences who decided, billions of streams at a time, whose songs would define their days.