Lady Gaga Dethrones Bad Bunny as the World’s Biggest Pop Star
Lady Gaga has returned to the pinnacle of pop music.
Gaga was the biggest pop star in the world this past month, according to Bloomberg’s Pop Star Power Rankings, dethroning Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny after a three-month run.
Gaga surged to the top thanks to interest in her new record “Chromatica,” which was the best-selling album in the U.S. this past month. Gaga sold more than 400,000 copies in a month when no other artist topped 300,000. Its lead singles “Stupid Love” and “Rain on Me” lifted Gaga on Spotify, where she was the most-listened-to artist in June, as well as on YouTube, where her videos racked up more than 188 million views (fifth most).
“Chromatica” is Gaga’s first proper dance record in almost a decade, and her first true streaming breakthrough as a solo artist. Gaga started her career when physical albums still made up a majority of overall sales, and broke through when iTunes was the main way to release music online.
After starting her career with three straight dance pop records, she made an album of jazzy duets with Tony Bennett, and followed that up with “Joanne,” a blend of country and soft rock. While both albums were well-received by critics, neither was as big a hit as her earlier up-tempo work, which would have played better on Spotify’s pop and dance playlists.
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Gaga’s success on streaming services started in an unlikely place — the soundtrack for “A Star is Born.”
Movie musicals are not the prime genre for the super users of Spotify or Apple Music. Yet sensing that the movie and the music had potential to be a big smash, her record label Interscope pushed the album to streaming services and secured placement on the playlists that are crucial to making a song a big hit. (Some $436 million in box office grosses didn’t hurt either.)
“A Star Is Born” was the fourth biggest album in the world last year, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and its lead single “Shallow” was one of the 10 biggest songs of the year. Fans have streamed the song more than 1 billion times on Spotify alone.
Gaga started to work on “Chromatica” before finishing the promotion of “A Star is Born,” penning “Stupid Love,” the debut single, nearly three years ago. Some of her team had hoped to get the album out in 2019, or shortly thereafter, to capitalize on Gaga’s performances at the Super Bowl and the 2019 Academy Awards. But the album wasn’t ready until 2020.
Gaga had planned to release the album in April, the same weekend she was to perform at Coachella, the largest music festival in North America. That was until the coronavirus led to the cancellation of Coachella, and threw the entire global economy into disarray. Gaga, Sam Smith and Alicia Keys all pushed their release dates, avoiding a substantial dip in music listening during the first month of global lockdown.
But with “Stupid Love” already in the market, Gaga and Interscope only postponed the release to the end of May, by which point music consumption had rebounded. They also utilized collaborations with two of the biggest acts in youth culture: Ariana Grande and Blackpink. Grande sings alongside Gaga on “Rain on Me,” the album’s second single, which has already surpassed “Stupid Love” in consumption, while Blackpink, the Korean pop group, is on “Sour Candy.”
“Women will be at the forefront of this culture,” said Daouda Leonard, who manages BloodPop, a producer who worked on much of the album. “Women are at the forefront of dance music and will usher in a new revolution.”
(An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the single “Stupid Love.”)