Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century Podcast: Ariana Grande (No. 9)

On today’s (Oct. 18) episode of the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century podcast, we reach No. 9 of our list with a teen TV star who showed up to pop music in the mid-2010s already a near-fully formed star — and just continued to get bigger and better, until she came to define streaming-era pop stardom. (Read our No. 9 Greatest Pop Star essay about Ariana Grande here.)

Host Andrew Unterberger is joined by Billboard staff writers Kyle Denis and Hannah Dailey to talk about how, despite not making her proper debut until 2013 — later than any other artist in our top 10 — Ariana still shines as one of the brightest stars of the entire century so far. We lay the groundwork with discussion of her scene-stealing (show-stealing?) turn as Cat Valentine in Nickelodeon’s Victorious, and how that made her a Gen Z icon even before her pop debut — but also how that 2013 bow flew in the face of a lot of the assumptions fans had made about her based on her performance.

We then get into Grande’s two pop imperial phases — one as a bulletproof top 40 radio hitmaker of the mid-2010s, and one as a defining pop&B albums artist at the turn of the decade — and how they were interrupted by unthinkable tragedy and punctuated by real-life celebrity drama that made her one of the most headline-capturing artists of her era. We then make the cases for her two 2020s albums, dive into the complicated and often contentious relationship she has with her fanbase, and defend “Donutgate” as Ariana once again simply being ahead of her time.

Listen to our latest below, catch up on our past episodes here, and be sure to subscribe to Billboard‘s Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century series wherever you get your podcasts! (New episodes will be revealed on Wednesday and Friday for the next couple weeks, following the publishing of our Tuesday and Thursday Greatest Pop Star rankings for that week, before moving to a once-a-week schedule for the rest of the list.)