As the ink dries on 2025, music obsessives will see to no shortage of album, song, or artist of the year conversations. Yet while the critical eye has plenty to take in every December, we’ve remained trained on the commercial angle on a weekly basis for Music Daily’s Tracks. Before we fully turn the page, we’ve compiled a list of the names that made the biggest impact on our charts this year, from some brand new faces like Olivia Dean to established ones that made their stardom a matter beyond debate like Morgan Wallen.
Olivia Dean
We’ll stop short of calling it a British takeover in earnest. Still, the rich tradition of UK singer-songwriters gained another chapter this year. Olivia Dean, a continual presence in her home country’s circuit since inking a major deal in 2019, finally became a global star with her second full-length LP. While the late-year release of her Art of Loving means we haven’t yet seen how long-lasting her smash hits will be, it didn’t take long to feel its presence overall. “Man I Need” clocked into our top 10 every week from mid-September until Christmas music took over in the final month, with further releases like “So Easy,” “A Couple Minutes,” and “Nice To Each Other” tagging along as her stardom became truly cemented.
K-Pop Demon Hunters
At this point, the global momentum behind K-Pop is something that any music fan should readily recognize. However, when it comes to the stateside market, it’s been only the most dominant acts that’ve been able to achieve chart-topping status; the BLACKPINKs and BTSes of the world. Who would’ve thought that what broke that duopoly wouldn’t be the real-life product of an agency, but the formulation of a movie studio?
Indeed, the K-Pop Demon Hunters, animated stars of the feature film sensation and the tangible effort of the combined songwriting prowess of EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami, rapidly went from a novel curio to a week-to-week standard from our perspective. So much so, hits like “Golden,” “Your Idol,” and “How It’s Done” came together to land the top spot in over a dozen weeks, displaying incredible legs by nailing that achievement in July all the way into December.
Morgan Wallen
Shockingly, the entire top 40 turned over in terms of the artists featured except for Wallen, sneaking onto our January ’25 rankings with “Smile” at #37 before landing another 11 months later with “I’m The Problem” and “What I Want.” Yet comparing year-start to year-end rankings would belie his most significant success, the absolute inescapability of his fourth LP as we turned to summer. In the week ending June 13th, he credited nine of our top 50; it’d take until the release of Taylor Swift’s The Life of A Showgirl in October for him to be edged out of the top five.
Sabrina Carpenter
Just missing out on a far-apart repeat in that manner is Sabrina Carpenter, deserving of mention in this regard for pumping out two chart-topping LPs in back-to-back years. She began the year riding high off of Short n Sweet material like “Please Please Please” and “Taste,” before supplanting those with “Tears” and “Manchild” off of her Man’s Best Friend, concrete proof that she’s in mainstream popstar conversations for the foreseeable future.
Kendrick Lamar
Though in a “what have you done for me lately” industry, he may not be the first name we cite in discussing 2025 as a whole, we can’t close this discussion without bringing up one Kendrick Lamar. His exploits in 2024 are beyond reproach, but fare from his GNX was able to capitalize in lulls between landmark new releases.
“luther,” in particular, stood as a dominant force in the early portion of the year, bridging the period around Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show comfortably through the end of summer as a top 3 hit in either span. No doubt, those with an eye on the industry’s inner workings will remember this song for quite some time as the chief consideration in Billboard’s amended chart tracking. The only thing that dropped the song from the company’s roundups was after new “recurrence” rules went into effect to change what it perceived as “staleness” in its rankings.
As always, you can catch the music mentioned throughout this piece wherever you stream your music.
