How Much Should We Consider Morgan Wallen a Pop Star in 2025?

This podcast episode is part of the Billboard editorial staff’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 list. Find our accompanying Morgan Wallen essay here, and all the rest of our essays and podcasts related to the list here.

For the most part, Morgan Wallen‘s 2025 went the same way that the rest of his 2020s have gone: With one commercial win after another. His I’m the Problem album moved nearly 500,000 units in its first frame, spent double-digit weeks atop the Billboard 200, and spawned enough additional hit singles to go with his prior hits that Wallen ended up on 10 total songs on the year-end Billboard Hot 100. But this year, Morgan Wallen — whose pop star credentials are always a little under question — also felt a little less isolated from the rest of popular music and culture, thanks to his own self-curated music festival, a chart-topping duet with another Greatest Pop Stars contender, and one of the year’s great accidental pop memes.

This Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 episode of the Greatest Pop Stars podcast looks at how Morgan Wallen ended up at No. 8 on our list — his second time making Greatest Pop Stars’ year-end rankings — thanks to a year that kept his 2020s-long commercial winning streak going, without any of the more boneheaded off-court behavior that has often marked his time in the mainstream. (You can find Jessica Nicholson’s essay on Morgan Wallen’s latest huge year here.) Today, Melinda Newman — Billboard‘s executive editor, West Coast and Nashville, and head of our country coverage — joins host Andrew Unterberger to relive the relatively smooth sailing of Wallen’s 2025, which ended with him as big and as central to popular music as ever before.

Along the way, we ask all the most pressing questions about Morgan Wallen’s 2025: Has he picked up where Drake left off musically and commercially? Was the twist in the titling of I’m the Problem clever or just kinda nasty? Was “What I Want” a successful venture into the pop world? Do we want to defend him sampling Keith Whitley on “Miami”? What was the big deal about him leaving SNL a little early (and how grateful are we to have gotten “Get me to God’s country” out of the whole thing)? And most importantly: How much do we consider Morgan Wallen to actually be a pop star at this point in his career?