Bruno Mars Doesn't Need an Album to Rule the Charts
Singer and songwriter Bruno Mars hasn't released a solo album since 2016 – and yet, his popularity keeps growing.
Over the past seven months, Mars has released a flurry of new hit singles with prominent female artists, inspiring millions of fans to engage with his music. In August, he dropped the Grammy-winning Die With a Smile, a love song performed with Lady Gaga. In October, came APT., a collaboration with Blackpink's Rosé. And in January, he uncorked Fat Juicy & Wet, a racy track with rapper Sexyy Red.
Along the way, he became the first artist to reach 150 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and his Lady Gaga duet reached 1 billion streams on the platform faster than any other song in the service's history. To date, 17 of Mars' songs have surpassed the billion-stream milestone.
'Bruno, you are an incredible human being, you're a musician for the ages,' Lady Gaga said in her Grammy acceptance speech.
All of which has propelled Mars to No. 4 on Bloomberg's Pop Star Power Rankings this month.
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'Over the course of his career, Bruno has built one of the most creatively important and commercially successful catalogs in history,' Elliot Grainge, chief executive officer of Atlantic Records, Mars' label, wrote in an email. 'He is uniquely gifted and never confined to any one thing – a true testament to his artistry and global cross-generational appeal.'
Just last week, thanks to a new viral dance trend, Mars' track The Lazy Song, originally released on his debut album in 2010, landed at No. 58 on YouTube Music's chart of the top 100 songs.
In many ways, Mars' recent hot streak comes as no surprise. He has long anchored highly successful live shows and maintains a loyal audience of listeners who regularly stream his songs. His catchy tracks, like 2014's Uptown Funk with Mark Ronson, have become go-to standards at parties and sports games.
Many of Mars' best-known hits involve collaborations with top stars. His last album was released in 2021 under the name Silk Sonic, his duo with drummer and singer Anderson .Paak.
'I've done collabs with everybody,' Paak said in a joint interview with Mars and Ebro Darden a few years ago. 'I wanted to go straight to the top … and everybody told me, 'There's one cheat code: it's linking up with this dude. Get Bruno on your side.''
Fans flock to see Mars as a solo act, too. In August, he sold more than 58,000 tickets per performance over a three-night stint in Mexico City. Those dates grossed $18.4 million while his multiyear residency at the Park MGM in Las Vegas grossed $124.5 million across 79 shows, according to Billboard. He'll be performing at the casino again in May and June.
Source: Pollstar, Spotify, Luminate, Chartmetric and YouTube
Editors: Felix Gillette Lucas Shaw
Design, development and data by Christopher Cannon, Julian Burgess and Alex McIntyre.
Methodology:
Bloomberg ranked the world's most influential pop stars based on seven criteria:
Trailing three-month gross revenues from live shows
Trailing 30-day ticket sales for live shows
Trailing four-week album sales
Trailing four-week digital song streams
Trailing four-week YouTube views
Trailing 30-day total followers added on Instagram
Trailing 30-day total followers added on TikTok
Data for live shows is provided by Pollstar, which ranks the top 100 artists by average gross revenues received per show and top 75 artists by average number of tickets sold per show. Both datasets are released on a weekly basis, with Bloomberg using the final weekly releases for that calendar month. From this universe of artists for this date, Bloomberg calculates the total gross revenues over the trailing three months and total ticket sales for the previous 30 days.
Album sales data is provided by Luminate. Figures are released weekly for the Billboard top 200 albums based on 'total activity,' which is defined as albums, track-equivalent albums and audio on-demand streaming-equivalent albums combined. To construct the universe of eligible artists for that month's ranking, Bloomberg includes any artist who is in the top 100 for any given week. Bloomberg then sums each artist's total activity throughout the month. Figures for a given week are included as long as the final day of that week occurs during the calendar month.
Digital-song streaming data is provided by Spotify. Figures are released weekly for the top 200 songs. To construct the universe of eligible artists for that month's ranking, Bloomberg includes any artist who is in the top 100 for any given week. Bloomberg then sums each artist's total number of streams throughout the month. Figures for a given week are included as long as the final day of that week occurs during the calendar month.
YouTube releases weekly data on its top 100 most-viewed artists and videos. Bloomberg uses artists from the category of 'Global - Top Songs' to construct the universe of performers who qualify for the ranking. Bloomberg then sums each artist's total views throughout the month. Figures for a given week are included as long as the final day of that week occurs during the calendar month.
Instagram data is provided by Chartmetric. Followers added are measured over the course of the calendar month, from the start of the first day of the month through the end of the last day of the month.
TikTok data is provided by Chartmetric. Followers added are measured over the course of the calendar month, from the start of the first day of the month through the end of the last day of the month.
For any given show, song or album that involves a collaboration of multiple artists, each artist is considered as a separate entity and credited with the total number of gross revenues, ticket sales, song streams, or views associated with the collaborative effort. If an act is an established duo or trio, the act is treated as a single entity. Artists who participate on a soundtrack album (as part of 'various artists') are not included. For March, April and May 2020 rankings, collaborating artists were not included for Spotify and YouTube data. They are included in rankings from June 2020 onward.
Comedians, models and other artists who appear in the top 100 of the six metrics (top 75 for 30-day ticket sales) but do not have musical careers are eliminated from the final universe. Each artist's ranking within the six variables reflects their position among this final list of qualified artists. An artist with no ranking for one of the six metrics means they did not appear within the top 100 (top 75 for 30-day ticket sales) at any point during the previous month.
With the universe established, each artist is ranked on each metric. Artists are then scored on a scale of 0 to 100 for each metric based on their relative position within the metric's ranking. The best-performing artist receives a score of 100, the worst-performing artist a score of 0, while all other artists are scored proportionally based on their position between the best- and worst-performing artists. The six metrics are equally weighted and averaged for a final score between 0 and 100.
Note: Beginning with April 2020 edition of the ranking, two changes were introduced:
Most artists have canceled or rescheduled tours due to the coronavirus, so there is no new data on ticket sales or box office grosses. It's unclear when that will change. The four remaining metrics are weighted at 25% each in this new version.
For data that is released weekly, the ranking now includes any data whose week ends in the given calendar month. Previously, a week's data was used if it was released in the calendar month.
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