With the awards season right around the corner, the question of “Is this era of pop music the greatest?” is once again in the limelight. Discussions about “the golden age of pop music” have been around for a long time, but were never serious debates until last year. The question began last year after the massive success of such talents as Tyler, The Creator, Bruno Mars, Kendrick Lamar, and most importantly, Sabrina Carpenter. Sabrina brought the old-school female popstar back. She embraces that same look and sound that made acts like Britney Spears and Madonna popular to their own era, but put her own unique and modern spin on that popstar formula.
Pop music has gone through many changes over its history. What first began as popular music was home to just that in its early history. It functioned more as a playlist for songs from artists that were selling a ton of records. People such as The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elvis, and even Stevie Wonder were played all the time throughout the 1960s. However, somewhere down the line that changed, and it changed thanks to one man: Michael Jackson. Jackson was already a pop radio darling by the time his “Thriller” album was released in November 1982. He was with “The Jackson 5” since he was a young boy and practically grew up making hits for the radio, but “Thriller” in particular changed the course of pop music forever. Before “Thriller”, rock was all over the charts and pop radio just functioned as another rock radio, but after “Thriller” we saw acts like Madonna, Wham!, Cyndi Lauper, Whitney Houston, and Ha-Ha.
The 1980s is where pop music became the pop music you hear now, but since then, the format has changed. Artists now aim for virality and parasocial relationships with their fans, both of which may help with streaming numbers and ticket or album sales for the artists. Social media has drastically changed how pop music charts. Play time on the radio used to be based on whatever singles were put out by big names in the industry, or just whatever songs the artists or their label told you to play, but that all changed for the first time with the introduction of MTV. Before there was TikTok to tell you what songs to chart, there was MTV.
To say MTV was massive in the 80s is an understatement. For the first time there was another medium that determined income and playability of music artists. If you could create a great music video to go with your song then MTV will play it more, and the more MTV plays a song, the more radio stations will play that song. But now with MTV no longer playing music, partly because of platforms like YouTube in the mid 2000s, artists can’t really blow up like they used to based on the music video for one of their songs, so they turn to social media.
Just like how MTV determined how artists of the past got played on the radio, TikTok determines the big stars of today. Now in a post MTV world, big artists of the past like Michael Jackson had about 19 billion streams in 2025, but artists like The Weeknd had over 76 billion streams on Spotify. The distance between the biggest female popstars isn’t as bad. Madonna had 10 billion total streams, while Sabrina Carpenter had 8 billion. The 1980s were seen as the golden age of pop music, but now those acts are just barely holding on.
Spotify listens aren’t too accurate either however. Many artists from past generations sold their music through records, so those listeners are more likely to listen to their vinyl than their Spotify page. So maybe it’s not that this new generation of popstars are better, but that they get their attention in a different way. It’s easy to think that the popstars now are so much bigger and better because we see them everywhere on the internet and in commercials, but artists like Madonna or Michael Jackson had that same level of fame in an age before viral TikToks.
So in short, no, this is not “The Golden Age of Pop Music”. The artists now are insanely talented but are not a Michael Jackson level of talent and fame. It’s easy to think of our popstars now as bigger than ever, but is that just because of social media algorithms, or is it actually based on true genuine feelings of excitement?
