Mariah Carey

She handed a demo tape to Columbia Records chief Tommy Mottola at a party in 1988. He listened in his car leaving, turned around, and spent two weeks tracking her down. That tape became Mariah Carey, a debut that spent 11 weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 and produced four consecutive chart-topping singles, the first artist since the Jackson 5 to do that. Columbia spent over $1 million promoting it. What they couldn't manufacture was the five-octave range and a whistle register that stopped critics mid-sentence.

The real empire is one track. 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' hit 2 billion Spotify streams in December 2024, holds 20 weeks at #1 on the Hot 100 (the all-time record), and earns an estimated $2 million in royalties annually. Virgin Records bought out her $80 million contract after Glitter bombed in 2001. She came back and broke Elvis Presley's record for career number-one singles in 2008. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has passed on her three consecutive years. Her response: 'Haters.'

Her parents' interracial marriage in the 1960s got the family dog poisoned and the car set on fire. Her mother, a Juilliard-trained opera singer of Irish descent, had to be the one to buy their house because the sellers refused to sell to a Black man. Carey grew up largely alone after her parents divorced, teaching herself to sing by imitating her mother's Verdi arias. The holiday queen branding papers over a lot of that. She also has a shelved 1990s grunge album, Someone's Ugly Daughter, and says she plans to release it.