Who Are the Biggest Global Hitmakers of the 2020s So Far?
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The 2020s have already produced a pretty wild run. After Hours gave The Weeknd the biggest hit ever on the Billboard Hot 100, Olivia Rodrigo arrived with multiple #1 debuts straight away, Bad Bunny turned album tracks into sustained top-10 events, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour helped fuel a long-running catalog surge, Sabrina Carpenter broke all the way through after years of buildup, and a fictional soundtrack act somehow ended up ruling 2025.
This ranking follows that story through hit singles alone. Using Global 200 points, it totals each artist's songs, splits collaborations by billing, and asks who actually drove the biggest global hits of each calendar year.
Taken year by year, the decade starts to look less like one clean trend line and more like a series of different winning formulas: an all-time smash, an overwhelming album cycle, a catalog boom, or a newer artist catching fire all at once.
Methodology
- Weekly Global 200 placements are converted into inverse chart points and summed across each artist's songs, using Spotify before September 2020 and Billboard from September 2020 onward.
- Christmas and other seasonal holiday songs are excluded from every ranking.
- Billing matters: solo songs count in full, songs with multiple lead artists split points evenly across those leads (50/50 for duos), and songs with featured artists split 70% to the lead billing and 30% to the featured billing. If a song's official billing changed during its chart run, the split follows the billing in effect at the time.1 If a revised credit remained in place for a meaningful stretch, that credit stays fixed from that point onward.2
2020
2020 belonged to The Weeknd by a wide margin, with "Blinding Lights" doing most of the work. It was the clearest example in these rankings of how one enormous global hit could shape an entire year.
2021
2021 was Olivia Rodrigo's instant takeover. There was no slow rise to the top: "drivers license", "deja vu", and "good 4 u" threw her straight there, turning a debut into the kind of full-pop era most artists spent years trying to build.
2022
2022 was Bad Bunny at full scale. It still stands as the biggest artist-year total anywhere in this ranking, powered not by one or two runaway hits but by an album era so massive that 10 different songs cleared 1K points, with several of them sitting in the top 10 for months after release.
2023
2023 was the year Taylor Swift's catalog hit escape velocity. "Anti-Hero" and Midnights set the table, the Eras Tour turned her full discography into an event, and by year-end songs from multiple eras were all feeding the biggest total of the year.
2024
2024 was Sabrina Carpenter's leap from buzz to total dominant force. "Espresso" opened the door, "Please Please Please" kept the momentum rolling, and "Taste" helped solidify her as a superstar. By the end of the year, what started as a breakout had turned into one of the most impressive single runs anywhere in these rankings.
2025
2025 was the outlier. KPop Demon Hunters did not just produce one giant song; it produced a whole hit ecosystem, with HUNTR/X riding "Golden" to a runaway win and Saja Boys also landing in the year's top 10.
What Stands Out
- Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, and The Weeknd each make the yearly top 10 four times, more than anyone else in the dataset.
- No act wins more than one year.
- 2024 is the most newcomer-heavy year near the top, with Sabrina Carpenter, Benson Boone, Teddy Swims, Shaboozey, and Chappell Roan all reaching that year's top 10.
Taken together, the rankings show a decade with recurring stars but no single formula for winning it. Some years were driven by one massive hit, others by an album campaign, a catalog wave, or a newer artist catching fire at exactly the right moment.
Biggest Artist-Years of the Decade
Across all six years in this article, these are the 10 biggest artist-years so far.
Biggest Artists of the Decade So Far
If we combine every year from 2020 through 2026 so far into one running total, these are the 50 artists with the most Global 200 singles points across the decade so far. The "Defining hit" tag uses the same credit-billing splits and weighting as the ranking itself, rather than raw unadjusted song totals.
Footnotes
| Ref | Explanation |
|---|---|
| 1 | This is a best-effort method for assigning points to the most appropriate billing, not a perfect reconstruction of every credit change. "Levitating" is the clearest exception here: Billboard later removed DaBaby's credit from the Global 200 listing, and that removal is assumed to apply retroactively to all weeks. |
| 2 | If a revised billing stays in place for a meaningful stretch, it remains fixed from that point forward. For example, "Save Your Tears" keeps Ariana Grande's remix credit from the remix onward even if that version later stopped accounting for most of the song's week-to-week points. |
