The Femininomenon
From “Swiftmania” to “Brat Summer,” Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, and Beyoncé dominated the music of 2024 with their songs. How did the women achieve this dominance?
Beyoncé Knowles must have suspected she’d have to move fast. At 43, she’s the oldest and most experienced of the artists who’ve defined this pop year like no other, and she announced her new album via a quick commercial during the Super Bowl on February 11. Cowboy Carter dropped on March 29, getting the attention it deserved.
But the window in which Beyoncé could bask in the spotlight—both in the media and on the charts—was brief and slammed shut almost right away. That’s because spring and summer were taken over by others, most notably Taylor Swift, currently the world’s biggest pop star, but also young artists like Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo, Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan—all of them with different but forceful, liberating visions of pop. Several of their albums came out in rapid succession, dominating the charts—a truly impressive display of female power in the pop industry.
How did we arrive at this “Femininomenon,” to quote the title of a popular track by the young singer Chappell Roan? Dubbed “Pop Girl Summer” by the US media, this back-and-forth between successful women artists shows that the music industry’s structure is changing while the spirit of the times has become more receptive to confident, feminine pop narratives.
For now, 2024 marks the end of the pop singer as a sexy dress-up doll of a patriarchal industry. Female pop, in its themes, is submitting less and less to the needs, gaze, and fantasies of male counterparts. More and more, women are telling new, freer stories for women—largely independent of manipulative producers and record bosses—and are finding huge success. Men are on board, too.
Beyoncé’s restitution pop
Smart as she is, Beyoncé saw this coming when she got Cowboy Carter out early, before Swift, Eilish, Lipa, Carpenter, or Charli XCX could. The signs of a shift had already been mounting for some time—and in recent years, she herself has had a lot to do with it. Born in the American South, the singer has, at the latest since her 2016 album Lemonade, been making music you might call “restitution pop,” a cultural reclamation of styles and genres. With Cowboy Carter, she spotlighted the legacy of Black musicians in America’s traditionally white-dominated country music scene. Featuring numerous guest artists from the genre—including the legendary Dolly Parton—Beyoncé put her own stamp on American folk music through her pop-star persona, highlighting its African American roots in the process.
With “Texas Hold ’Em,” her ninth number-one single overall, a breezy nod to line dancing, Knowles became the first Black woman to top the country charts—and she made pop history. Yet Cowboy Carter isn’t really a country album, she stated confidently, calling it instead a “Beyoncé album.” But it was one that in 2024 left its mark on the diversifying genre and gave a boost to up-and-coming Black country artists like Shaboozey and Tanner Adell, who enjoyed their breakthroughs this year.
On February 4—just days before Knowles announced her album at the football mega-event in Nevada—the 66th Grammy Awards were held in Los Angeles. Usually a big presence (she’s a record-holding, 32-time winner), Beyoncé didn’t play a part this year. Instead, the Grammys shone the spotlight on numerous female artists—more than ever before at any previous ceremony. “Can we just take a moment to appreciate that women have dominated music this year?” host Trevor Noah asked in his opening monologue, referring to the “Barbie” year of 2023, which was already a triumph of female pop culture. Seven of the nominees for Album of the Year were women.
And Taylor Swift? Broke yet another record
What made this night so remarkable was that women weren’t just getting all the nominations—they actually took home the awards. Only one man—pianist and R&B singer Jon Batiste—snagged one of the major categories. Billie Eilish won the Grammy for Best Song, SZA grabbed three awards (Best R&B Song, Best Progressive R&B Album, and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance with rock singer Phoebe Bridgers), and Miley Cyrus took home the Grammy for Single of the Year. South African newcomer Tyla won as well, along with country sensation Lainey Wilson. Performances by pioneers like Celine Dion, Tracy Chapman, and Joni Mitchell rounded out this celebration of female power in pop. And Taylor Swift? She broke another record, naturally.
Her album Midnights was named Best Pop Album—the top prize, which the then-34-year-old was winning for the fourth time. That achievement put her ahead of icons like Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon. But she wasn’t done yet: Swift used her moment on stage to announce her next album, The Tortured Poets Department, set for release on April 19. At the time, Swift was in the middle of her sprawling “Eras” tour, celebrating the various phases of her already legendary career. In December 2023, news broke that her tour was the first in history to surpass a billion dollars in revenue. The “Eras” concert film raked in $93 million at the US box office on its opening weekend alone, and is now over $180 million. By then, Swift had amassed some 26 billion streams on Spotify. Appearing at the Grammys as the pop star of the moment—if not the decade—she kept the ball rolling with her surprise album announcement. If 2023 had been her year, 2024 was shaping up to be hers as well. And so it went.
The 66th Grammys are such a pivotal moment in the new history of pop because they most clearly reflect the changing times—a shift toward female emancipation and hegemony. For decades, men ruled both the stage and the backstage at the awards. At the 2018 Grammys, in the midst of the #MeToo conversation that was roiling the music world with accusations of abuse and sexual assault, a major blowup occurred.
A statement that would echo for a long time
True, singer Kesha—who had unsuccessfully sued her producer Dr. Luke—got to perform with a few star colleagues, singing a song that revealed her emotional distress. But among the Album of the Year nominees, there was only one woman: Lorde. She lost to pop entertainer Bruno Mars. Alessia Cara was the only woman to win a top-category award, scooping Best New Artist. The hashtag #GrammysSoMale trended on social media. When asked about it, Neil Portnow, who was then president of the Recording Academy, told Variety that women needed to be more proactive, to show more determination to become musicians, sound engineers, and producers—and “step up” to leadership positions in the industry. The phrase long haunted him. A year later, facing accusations of abuse himself, Portnow resigned as Academy president.
Many women in the industry took Portnow’s patronizing, paternalistic remarks as a provocation. Their outrage was palpable six years later, in February 2024, when Phoebe Bridgers told reporters at the Grammys: “Neil Portnow said if women want to be nominated for Grammys, they should step up… and I just want to say to him: I know you’re not dead yet, but when you are, I hope you rot in your own piss.” Bridgers then won three Grammys with her queer rock trio Boygenius, including Best Rock Song, Best Rock Performance, and Best Alternative Rock Album—all categories once dominated by male acts. That success also owed something to the Academy’s radical transformation of its membership—pushing out too many old men and bringing in more people of color and women.
A more permeable industry is partly responsible for this new wave of femininity in pop. Early-2000s female pop stars—like Britney Spears or the Spice Girls with their “Girl Power” narrative—were still products of a business whose creative processes, from granting record deals to writing songs and producing, were mostly driven and controlled by men. Today, the big labels’ gatekeeper role no longer exists to the same extent. Software such as Ableton has long allowed artists to record music on their own, even in their bedrooms—like Billie Eilish did with her debut album, supported by her brother Finneas.
When it comes to marketing, artists can now handle everything themselves, free of industry meddling. Social media has been crucial for just about every successful pop singer. Channels like Instagram and TikTok give stars a direct line of communication and total control of what fans see. They can personally announce and promote merch and limited-edition album formats via short video clips or messages. Fans reward them with steadfast support, forming fandoms like the Swifties (Taylor Swift) or Charli’s Angels (Charli XCX). These fans are highly networked and call themselves an “army.” If need be, they’ll unleash fierce internet storms against misogyny, fake news, or nasty criticism. In this system, record labels—and even traditional media outlets—barely matter anymore. Getting interviews with this year’s top pop singers is all but impossible.
The blonde All-American Girl next door

They’d rather let their performances and music speak for them. Taylor Swift is the absolute master of this approach—if not the inventor of a style of pop songwriting that’s hugely popular among young women. Despite her massive, billion-dollar empire (which she largely controls herself), she’s maintained the illusion of universal relatability and intimacy. In her songs, the untouchable, radiant high-school prom queen often reveals her inner Cinderella—the blonde All-American Girl next door. Candid and unflinchingly sincere, she writes diary-like short stories about deeply human emotions, even self-doubt, vulnerability, insecurity, and sometimes mistakes—all with a playful wink.
This approach resonates with listeners worldwide, even though she might be the most American pop artist we’ve seen in a while. She provides a sense of identification across cultures and class lines. You have to say her name in the same breath as Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Madonna, given her enormous cultural impact. Royals show up at her concerts as if seeking an audience. When she declares that she plans to vote for Kamala Harris in the US presidential election and encourages young people to cast their ballots, it rocks the political scene.
You’d need entire pages to list the streaming and chart records that The Tortured Poets Department has broken since mid-April. In just 48 hours, the album—packed with 31 new tracks—was already the best-selling release of the entire year. Why does Swift’s witty yet fundamentally romantic brand of confessional lyricism resonate so widely? Sure, she supports LGBTQ+ rights, but she secures her massive mainstream appeal by staying rooted in heteronormative themes. The songs from her latest blockbuster album revolve around her (failed) relationships with actor Joe Alwyn and rock singer Matty Healy, and her current romance with football star Travis Kelce. She can sometimes be spotted at his Kansas City Chiefs games, playing the high-school princess flirting with the star athlete—a real-life American pop fairy tale. If the crisis-ridden world, unsettled by Trump-era turmoil, needed some reassurance that there’s still a “good” America to dream about, Taylor Swift is the embodiment of that hope. Not as a pinup—like Marilyn Monroe or other pop icons once were—but as an empowered, independent entrepreneur and confident self-made woman.
By summer, the worldwide “Swiftmania” had spread to Europe after touring the US, Australia, and Asia. Taylor Swift played seven shows in Germany: three in Gelsenkirchen, two in Hamburg, and two in Munich, attracting more than 400,000 fans. Ticket sales alone were a huge spectacle. For three days, the Ruhr Valley city of Gelsenkirchen even changed its name to “Swiftkirchen.” In the city center, fans—dressed in imaginative costumes and glitter makeup—gathered and traded fan merch. The homemade friendship bracelets that mark the Swiftie community were swapped left and right.
Pop concerts as safer spaces

These gatherings radiated a peaceful, joyful, almost hippie-like vibe—like a female Woodstock. Swift’s shows, like those of many of her generation’s new pop stars, offer young women a safer space. These are environments where they can feel largely protected from boorish conduct, sexual harassment, and the “male gaze.” It helps that straight men tend to be a minority at these concerts, but that’s not the only reason. While these young women’s music can be just as bold, energetic, or loud as any male pop act, their songs usually project positive empowerment vibes—even when they deal with subjects like depression. Fans belt out these catchy pop anthems—especially Swift’s—from start to finish, chanting along with every lyric.
Self-portrayal as a sweet temptation
There’s a big craving for freedom that finds expression in these live gatherings. #MeToo, the push for equality, and the dismantling of traditional gender norms and behaviors have all contributed to the boom in women’s pop perspectives. The second half of the summer belonged to more radical, freedom-embracing women with their own narratives. Swift protégé Sabrina Carpenter scored a massive summer hit with “Espresso,” portraying herself as a sweet temptation keeping her guys on their toes with “twisted humor,” like a caffeine jolt. In August, she released her sixth album Short n’ Sweet, reaching the top spot on the US charts for the first time.
Meanwhile, Billie Eilish has long since moved on from boys. In December 2023, she casually came out as a lesbian in an interview, and on her album Hit Me Hard and Soft (released in May), she unabashedly explored her desire for women. “I could eat that girl for lunch” was one of this year’s most sexually explicit pop lines. Chappell Roan—a 26-year-old singer from America’s Midwest—also makes no secret of being gay, though she flaunts her sexuality, her kinkiness, and flamboyant costumes on stage even more overtly than Eilish. Fans at her shows spell out the letters of her track “Hot to Go”—H-O-T-T-O-G-O—with their arms, reminiscent of the cheeky choreography to the Village People’s ’70s gay anthem “Y.M.C.A.” Reclaiming that extravagant drag-queen culture for a female context, Roan’s Madonna-meets-’80s-pop-rock sound and her offbeat style have drawn huge crowds to her festival gigs—at Chicago’s Lollapalooza, she reportedly broke the attendance record for the largest show in the festival’s pop-culture history.
From “Pop Girl Summer” to “Brat Summer”

A bit insecure, a bit brash, never shy about a raunchy joke, then suddenly deeply vulnerable—that’s the modern female pop tone Billie Eilish (then still a teenager) helped establish in 2019 with “Bad Guy.” Today, it’s the pop mainstream. “It’s the sound of young women joking around together in a time of growing distance between the sexes,” is how The Atlantic described this phenomenon.
You don’t have to be a “good girl,” as Brit Charli XCX underlined in June with her album Brat, which completely transformed the summer from Swiftie-blonde to bratty green. The 32-year-old—born Charlotte Emma Aitchison—has been releasing bold, idiosyncratic pop since 2013, often labeled “hyperpop.” Operating outside her major-label deals, she’s refined her electronic dance sound in collaborations with queer artists such as SOPHIE, Kim Petras, and Troye Sivan. But it wasn’t until this year, riding a wave of new acceptance from the broader culture, that she finally broke through. With the help of a meme campaign playing off her album art’s green aesthetic and blocky fonts, “Pop Girl Summer” morphed into “Brat Summer.” When Aitchison—based in Los Angeles—posted “kamala IS brat,” Kamala Harris’s campaign team even hopped on board, printing hats that read “demo(b)rat.”
Charli XCX, the black-haired “sex bomb” who paves her own way and grabs what she wants—partying all night and ignoring responsibility—is a refreshing counterpoint to Taylor Swift’s wholesome, blonde vibe. Asked about the concept behind her record, Aitchison told BBC’s “Sidetracked” podcast that a “brat” is someone who might wear “a pack of cigarettes, a Bic lighter, and a white tank top with no bra.” Basically, a little trashy, a bit edgy, a bit dangerous—and super cool.
And what are the men doing while these women are celebrating their newfound freedom? They’re reveling in rock nostalgia, gearing up for next year’s comeback tour by Oasis, the biggest Britpop bad boys of the ’90s.