Mariah Carey

The American singer-songwriter who rewrote the Billboard record book and then kept rewriting it. Born in Huntington, New York, on March 27, 1969, Carey signed to Columbia Records and released her debut album in 1990, and no artist in the history of the Hot 100 has matched what happened next: her first five singles all reached No. 1, a run that begins with "Vision of Love" and has never been equalled. Music Box, Merry Christmas, Daydream, Butterfly, and The Emancipation of Mimi carried her across two decades of commercial dominance, and her writing credit on nearly all of it separated her early from the pop-vocalist template she was initially sold as.

Nineteen Hot 100 No. 1s put her ahead of every other solo artist in chart history and one behind the Beatles overall. She is the only artist to have topped the chart in four separate decades, and she has spent more weeks at No. 1 than anyone since the chart began in 1958. Sixteen studio albums and more than 220 million records sold sit behind five Grammy Awards, a Best New Artist win in 1991, and a melismatic vocal style that became the default vocabulary for a generation of singers who followed her. Her 1994 Christmas recording returns to No. 1 nearly every December, three decades after it was made.