Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite

pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon.

This is your host, DJ Louis X. Louis X.

Reminding you to please rate, review, and subscribe

to the podcast wherever you're listening to it right now. We're available on social media at Pot Pantheon Pod. I'm at DJ, L-O-U-I-E-X-I-V on Twitter and Instagram. We have merch available at Potpentheonpod.com and our Patreon show, Pop Pantheon All Access, where we published at least three bonus episodes

of the show per month is available at patreon.com slash pop pantheon. Also, my queer pop party

gorgeous gorgeous has two installments coming up very soon, including next Friday, October 27th in

Bushwick. We're doing spooky gorgeous, our Halloween party. And on November 10th in Los Angeles, we will be doing our next installment at Resident in downtown. So hope to see you guys at Gorgeous Gorgeous. And of course, our upcoming live show, Pop Pantheon Live, Britney's memoir, music, and legacy will be happening November 2nd at the Crawford in Pasadena. Tickets for all of those things are available in the show notes of this episode.

All right.

So for this week's B-side, I invited Billboard's Elias Light onto the show to talk about a subject

he's been covering a lot in his columns, which is a dearth of new sustainable pop stars.

The question being, where are the new pop stars?

Elias has dug into why it has become increasingly difficult for major pop artists to break through, have a hit, and then build on that hit with a sustained run of singles, successful albums, and why there seems to be a lot more pop stars working today than ever,

and yet very few of them have the ability to create long sustained careers at the top.

So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Billboard's Elias Light.

Okay, so I'm here with senior writer at Billboard Elias Light.

Elias, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

My pleasure. So we're here today to talk about why there's no new pop stars or perhaps why there are less new pop stars breaking through in the current moment. You've written about this extensively

in Billboard. So I guess maybe to get us into this conversation, my first question for you would be

what inspired you to want to explore

this topic? There's obviously been this trend line of new artists having trouble kind of

...