I wish I’d been a fly on the wall listening to all the horse trading at Billboard this month.
Today they named Kendrick Lamar the number 1 pop star of 2024. I like Kendrick but that is ridiculous. Sorry.
The biggest pop star of 2024 was Taylor Swift. I’m not a Swiftie. I’m just going by the numbers.
Billboard says Swift was number 3, after Sabrina Carpenter. Hmmmm…Sabrina’s numbers were a little higher than Kendrick’s but not clos to Swift.
This year, Swift sold almost 18 million albums including streaming equivalent according to Luminate.
Of the 18 million, 5.78 million were CDs, LPs, or paid downloads. Her “Tortured Poets Department” sold around 7 million copies and was the number 1 album of the year.
As for Kendrick, his numbers pale by comparison. In 2024 he sold around 4.5 million copies including streaming. The sales for Cds, LPs, and downloads were just 378,000. Sabrina was just ahead of him.
As we all know, Swift’s The Eras Tour was the biggest ever. She made around $2 billion from March 2023 through last week. So let’s say she made a billion in 2024.
I don’t know how Billboard arrived at their list, but I dare say it was a negotiation among record execs, publicists, managers, and the magazine’s editors that would make the Ukraine peace talks seem tame.
Maybe they all decided it was boring to put Taylor at number 1 again. Maybe she told them she’d rather have the heat off her. Regardless, kudos to Kendrick for selling so much, even if it was a lot less than Swift. All of these recording artists did very, very well.
