Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish are two of the most famous faces and voices in pop music. Who is the more popular of the two?
Ariana Grande is currently ahead of Billie Eilish on every metric, particularly record sales and social media followers. However, she has also been active for considerably longer and has thus had more time to cultivate her large following. Billie Eilish is still a rising star and it appears very possible that she enjoys similar success to Ariana in the future.
For a comparison of Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish’s popularity, read on.
Record Sales
As Ariana and Billie are both solo recording artists, one of the most logical ways to compare their popularity is in record sales. This is complicated, however, by the fact that Ariana is nine years older than Billie and thus has a significant headstart.
Ariana has released 52 singles that have entered the Billboard charts. Of these, 16 have been Top 10 hits and four have reached the coveted Number 1 spot.
Billie has released 19 Billboard chart singles, with three of these reaching the Top 10 and one, “Bad Guy”, reaching Number 1. On average, their chart positions are relatively similar but Billie’s sample size is currently so small that it is difficult to compare them.
Ariana has released four Number 1 albums, while Billie has released one, however, Billie has also only released one studio album compared to Ariana’s five, giving her a 100% success rate thus far.
Both singers have reached the top spot in the Billboard Artist 100, which combines album and single sales to calculate the most popular star in music at the time.
Social Media
Social media is another interesting metric for measuring popularity but it isn’t always trustworthy due to the number of bots and spam accounts active online. Still, this is the same for both so it’s worthwhile comparing them.
On Instagram, Billie has a highly impressive 66 million followers while Ariana has a staggering 198 million followers. However, Ariana also has about ten times as many posts as Billie.
This isn’t to say that Billie would have ten times more followers with the same amount of posts, just that Ariana has had more time to cultivate her following. In any case, both women are powerhouses on Instagram, with Ariana positioned in the top five most-followed people on the platform.
Twitter tells a similar story, with Billie sitting at 4.7 million followers while Ariana has 76.2 million. Again, Ariana has about ten times more tweets than Billie but it also appears that Billie does not directly control her Twitter account.
Tweets on Billie’s account are almost exclusively promotional and refer to her in the third person, while Ariana clearly tweets in her own particular tone of voice.
YouTube is something of a combination of both musical and personal popularity, with music videos, audio, and vlogs available. This is also by far the closest of the major social media platforms.
While Ariana wins again with her 42.7 million subscribers, Billie is not particularly far behind her with 32.9 million subs.
Overall Popularity
Ultimately, it’s difficult to say who is the more popular musician today out of Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish. Ariana is ahead of Billie in terms of sales and followers but she has also been an active singer for several years longer, as well as her years as a TV star on Nickelodeon.
Billie Eilish is currently still a relative newcomer on the scene, with her popularity exploding in 2019. It’s impossible to know whether or not she will eventually catch up to Ariana’s level of global fame but it seems unlikely that the gap between the two will continue to exist in its current state for many more years.