It’s only fitting that an off-kilter year like 2021 has some unexpected year-end accolades to match. Apple Music’s Artist of the Year completed his 10-year rise from enigmatic master of dark, indie R&B to the smiling (if cosmetically bandaged) face of the Super Bowl halftime show, defining the breadth and scope of modern pop music and spectacle without so much as releasing an album of his own in 2021. The Songwriter of the Year is a wildly talented multi-hyphenate R&B torchbearer who was halfway to an EGOT before her debut album even hit the streets. And Breakthrough Artist of the Year, Top Album of the Year and Top Song of the Year all go to a teenager who came from seemingly out of nowhere in January to do nothing less than dominate the pop landscape and charts with high-school musical melodrama even a parent could love. And for the first time, Apple Music is also awarding Artists of the Year internationally, for specific countries and regions around the world. Watch films and interviews with the winners, listen to specials tracing their journeys over the past year, then explore more from each of these outstanding artists.

His fourth album, Made in Lagos, blends R&B and pop with the Afrobeats sound he helped pioneer, but Nigerian star Wizkid, born Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun, is determined to keep his sound rooted in Africa. “It’s important for me to keep it original,” he says. “From my videos to my production—to make sure it’s from me, and it’s from home.” That authenticity attracted stars including Tay Iwar, H.E.R. and Skepta, with a 2021 deluxe edition adding Buju and Justin Bieber. Though Wiz was already one of Apple Music’s most-played African artists on the continent, the Tems-featuring “Essence” catapulted him into global history in 2021, becoming the first song with lyrics in Yoruba to hit Billboard’s Global 200 chart; his monthly plays on Apple Music have grown more than 300 percent outside of Africa since August 2020. “People need to pay more attention to music out of Africa,” Wizkid says. “It’s food for your soul.”

Since 2018, when she dropped her second album NAKAMURA, Aya Nakamura has not so much risen to the top as skyrocketed. The Mali-born, France-raised singer—whose music blends R&B, hip-hop, pop, Afrobeats and more—is now one of the most-streamed Francophone artistson the planet. But if Nakamura (born Aya Danioko) has long been a music and fashion icon in France, 2021 marked the moment she went global, thanks to starry collaborations—with Stormzy, Ms Banks, Major Lazer and Maluma—and the soaring success of her third album AYA and single “Bobo”, which hit No. 1 on Apple Music’s daily Top 100 chart in France. “I never dreamt of becoming a world star,” Aya tells Apple Music. “My fanbase in France, they are the ones listening to my stuff since day one—they are my priority.”

RIN, born Renato Simunovic, dropped his third album, Kleinstadt, in October, with the mission statement that you don’t need to be in a big city to make a big impact (Kleinstadt translates as “small town”). And he leads by example: From his home in Bietigheim-Bissingen outside Stuttgart, RIN is on a mission to blow apart German rap’s horizons, layering R&B, grunge, house and even indie rock onto his cloud-rap and trap foundations. “I wanted to ask myself, ‘Can I do something else?’” he says of the album. “It was not about making my next big move or creating the next streaming hit—I simply wanted to create something with substance.”

Tokyo-based quartet OFFICIAL HIGE DANDISM (Satoshi Fujihara, Masaki Matsuura, Makoto Narazaki and Daisuke Ozasa) blew up via guitar-centric songs that bridge the gap between J-pop and rock. They made their major-label debut in 2018 and were one of Apple Music Japan’s most-played artists from 2019 to 2021—one of the first streaming success stories in a market that was relatively late to the game, paving the way for other artists to follow. 2021’s Editorialfeatures HIGEDAN experimenting with more electronic elements: “I think that messing up and trying again is part of the fun of making music,” vocalist/keyboardist Satoshi Fujihara tells Apple Music. “We make lots of mistakes before finally coming up with our ideal vision. It’s a time-consuming process. That’s also exactly the reason why doing it holds a lot of meaning for me and I’ll always be crazy about making music.”

After a 2020 that saw The Weeknd release a blockbuster album, After Hours, with multiple Top 10 singles—“Blinding Lights” the biggest and most buoyant among them—2021 could have easily been an off year, a relatively quiet stretch between albums. It wasn’t; instead, Abel Tesfaye redefined the very idea of downtime for an enterprising megastar. In addition to his must-watch solo Super Bowl performance, a Daniel Craig-fronted clip from The Weeknd’s Saturday Night Live appearance became one of the more ubiquitous memes in recent memory—it’s been ritualistically marking the end of the workweek for millions of people on Twitter and elsewhere for months. He’s made and released singles with vital artists across multiple genres, from hip-hop to pop to dance and Latin music, an avatar for the breadth of modern pop music and arguably as present and vital as he would be if he had released an album. And 10 years after the then-mysterious release of his hugely influential debut mixtapes (now available to stream as of this year), The Weeknd hasn’t just been culturally present in a way that very few stars ever become—he’s been the face of pandemic work ethic, a reliable constant in a moment of prolonged chaos.

“The best words to describe the life that we live—the things that we feel, the things that we see—is really a songwriter's purpose, I think,” H.E.R. tells Apple Music. “It's a way to tell stories and kind of leave a mark. If you never watched a documentary or read a book about it, you heard a song about it and you know this is exactly what happened 'cause Marvin Gaye said so or because Nina Simone said so. Thinking about that kind of role in history that songwriters play—it's just another way of storytelling.” The artist formerly known as Gabi Wilson approaches her craft like a proud classicist at a time when some fans of R&B are decrying the hip-hop-infused version of the genre that more often cracks the charts or soundtracks the night. She could easily shy away from the classification, but instead she leans into it, bringing elements of the style’s history into everything she touches to create the kind of music that can transcend its particulars. When she steps into a studio or onto a stage, she brings the whole of the tradition with her. She began the year with a handful of live performances, each one more remarkable than the next. Then came a stream of trophies—two Grammys (her third and fourth), an Oscar (her first) and a BET Award (her second). Perhaps most impressive of all, though, is that these are accomplishments earned for work that predates her debut album, titled Back of My Mind, which she also released this year—and on which she co-wrote all 21 songs.

This will go down as the Year of Epic Firsts for Olivia Rodrigo. In January, she released her first single, the tear-soaked breakup anthem “drivers license”, which soon became her first No. 1 hit and the most-streamed song released in 2021 on Apple Music, setting a record for the most first-week streams ever for an artist’s debut single. Her first album, SOUR, a vivid, intimate examination of teenage heartbreak, followed in May, and that soon became her first No. 1 album. First cover stories on every major music magazine followed, as did first conversations with the songwriters who made her fall in love with music in the first place, like Taylor Swift and Alanis Morissette. All in all, an object lesson in how to take a heartbreaking, embarrassing moment and use it for good. “I think that’s really special,” Rodrigo tells Apple Music, “for that to turn into something I’m really proud of instead of something I feel ashamed about.” And now, at the close of her life-changing year, Rodrigo is the deserving recipient of her first three Apple Music Awards—for Breakthrough Artist of the Year, but also Top Album of the Year (SOUR) and Top Song of the Year (“drivers license”).