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\n\tFor\u00a0this\u00a0<\/a>year\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0update<\/a>\u00a0of our ongoing\u00a0Greatest Pop Star by Year<\/a>\u00a0project,\u00a0<\/em>Billboard\u00a0will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week \u2014 having already revealed our\u00a0Honorable Mentions<\/a>, our\u00a0Comeback of the Year<\/a> and our Rookie of the Year<\/a> artists all last week, and our No. 10<\/a>, No. 9 <\/a>and No. 8 Greatest Pop Stars earlier this week. Now, at No. 7, we remember the year in Beyonc\u00e9 \u2014 who returned with one of the year\u2019s most ambitious albums and change the game yet again.<\/em><\/p>\n \n\t\u201cOK, they ready: Drop the new music.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIt was a quintessentially Beyonc\u00e9 moment, the kind that has come to define the last decade-plus of her continually bar-raising 21st century pop superstardom. Greeting TV viewers around the world during the most-watched event of the year \u2013 February\u2019s Super Bowl \u2013 Beyonc\u00e9 co-starred with Veep<\/em> actor Tony Hale in a Verizon ad in which she kept attempting to literally break the internet, to no avail. At the very end of the spot, having still failed to break the internet \u2013 even as \u201cthe first woman to launch the first rocket for the first performance in space\u201d \u2013 she instead broke character, issuing the above decree over her spaceship\u2019s intercom.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tLo and behold, two new songs magically appeared online immediately after: \u201cTexas Hold \u2018Em\u201d and \u201c16 Carriages,\u201d presumed to be the first tastes of her upcoming album, the second part of the history-excavating trilogy project she kicked off in 2022 with the dance-oriented Renaissance<\/em>. As fans raced to DSPs to confirm the rumors of new music that they were seeing on their social media feeds \u2013 likely ignoring whatever was transpiring between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers following their game\u2019s resumption \u2013 it appeared that the artist who first stopped the world with that digital drop way back in late 2013 had done it again. You could practically hear the chuckling worldwide: Only Beyonc\u00e9.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n