In 2019, Billboard‘s staff revealed its picks for the greatest pop star of every year dating back to 1981 (the first year of MTV, essentially the birth of the modern pop era), with essays making the case for each as the biggest, brightest and most important star in their solar system that calendar year. After adding BTS as the greatest pop star for 2020, we decided to expand the project a little bit. For the last three years, we’ve counted down our picks for the 10 greatest pop stars of the year, with full essays for everyone from No. 10 (Drake last year) to No. 1 (Taylor Swift last year), as well as bonus write-ups for our picks for Rookie and Comeback of the year, and even 10 close-but-not-quite honorable mentions.

And now, it’s about time for our 2023 rankings. We’ll be counting down our top 10 over the course of next week, with our top two being revealed the following Monday (Dec. 23). But first, we’ve got our 10 honorable mentions for this year — as well as our rookie and comeback artists of the year, to be unveiled on Thursday (Dec. 12). (If you missed any of our Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century rankings that we rolled out over the last few months, be sure to catch up on those as well.)

First, though: our obligatory reminder that unlike with our Year-End Charts, these Greatest Pop Stars are not mathematically determined by stats like chart position, streams or sales numbers. Those all play a big part in our final rankings, of course — but so do things like music videos, live performances and social media presence, and more intangible factors like cultural importance, industry influence and overall omnipresence. (And we measure this over the entire 2024 calendar, so if you were only heard from at the beginning or end of the year — or only had one big song or moment — that’s gonna hurt your performance here as well.)

Read on below for our best-of-the-rest picks in alphabetical order, and apologies to all the veteran hitmakers and rising phenoms whose presence we couldn’t make room for with just 10 honorable mention spots — for more about those, listen to our Greatest Pop Stars podcast episode later this week, as we discuss some of the names it killed us the most to leave off.