The biggest question surrounding the 2024 Grammy telecast, which is set for Sunday (Feb. 4), isn’t who’s going to win the big awards, it’s Will She or Won’t She – will Taylor Swift perform on the show, or will she be content to sit in the audience at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles to be on hand to accept a trophy should one or more come her way?
Swift was far and away the hottest artist of 2023, which was confirmed when she was declared Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2023 in December. Since the turn of the century, the vast majority of artists who received that accolade have performed on the Grammy telecast just a month or two later.
That stands to reason. The music business loves winners – and the artists who dominate the year are usually nominated for top-tier Grammys. And those nominees are usually invited to perform on the show. And those artists usually accept those invitations. A Grammy performance when you’re at the pinnacle of your success is something to go in the time capsule (known as YouTube) to be played pretty much forever.
Billboard explained the concept behind the Greatest Pop Star of the Year project when it was launched in 2020. “Mostly, we’re looking for the pop star that best defines each year; the one whose impact was most deeply felt across the most spaces … It’s not just hit singles and bestselling albums. It’s music videos, it’s live performances, it’s image, it’s headlines and controversy and cultural impact and overall ubiquity. It’s the answer to the question, ‘Could you have lived through this year without having an opinion on this artist?’”
The project retroactively went back to 1981, the year of MTV’s launch, but we’ll just take it back to the turn of the century. Here are the artists who were declared Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of the Year from 1999 to the present and whether or not they performed on the next Grammy telecast.