Taylor Swift is not the kind of girl who should be rudely barging in on a white-veiled occasion, but she’s very much ready to be a part of newly engaged Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco‘s wedding. 

The “Anti-Hero” singer was one of the first stars to publicly react to her longtime best friend’s engagement to the producer, news Gomez shared Wednesday night (Dec. 11) via an adorable post on Instagram. “forever starts now,” the Only Murders in the Building star had written, captioning a carousel of photos that began with a close-up of her ring, and included a snap of Blanco kissing her on the cheek. 

In the comments, Swift joked, “yes I will be the flower girl.” 

Numerous other friends also commented messages of congratulations on the post, including Cardi B, Jennifer Aniston, Lily Collins, Gordon Ramsay, Suki Waterhouse, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Michaels and more. Blanco chimed in as well, writing, “Hey wait… that’s my wife.” 

The news comes about a year and a half after Gomez and the “Eastside” musician started dating. The former first confirmed their relationship in December 2023, telling fans on Instagram, “He is my absolute everything in my heart.” 

As the “Lose You to Love Me” artist’s friend of 15 years, Swift has been there for Gomez through it all. The two women first sparked a friendship around 2009, when both  were dating Jonas brothers — Joe and Nick, respectively — and have stayed close ever since. The Wizards of Waverly Place alum attended multiple Eras Tour shows between its March 2023 kickoff and Dec. 8 finale in Vancouver, B.C., and both stars are quick to praise one another when given the chance. 

“The most influential artist, for me, it is kind of Taylor,” Gomez said on SiriusXM in 2022. “Not because she’s my friend, but she has been an artist that can transition into so many different genres and she is able to do it seamlessly, and I admire that so much. And that’s so rare. I love her process, and I just admire all the work that she’s done. She’s definitely inspired me.” 

That same year, Swift supported her bestie after the premiere of Gomez’s documentary, My Mind & Me. “So proud of you @selenagomez,” the “Karma” artist wrote on Instagram Stories at the time. “Love you forever.” 

A full 10 years ago, global audiences got to know Andrew Hozier-Byrne — the Irish singer-songwriter known to most simply as Hozier — with his smash “Take Me to Church.” Written and released while he was still an independent artist playing Dublin open mics, the howling alt-folk ballad decried religious institutional hypocrisy and turned into enough of a surprise hit to get licensed to Columbia Records. It became omnipresent and climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100; Hozier, in turn, became one of 2014’s biggest breakout stars.

But over the next decade, he never matched its crossover success. That is, until this year: with “Too Sweet,” a slinky pop-soul ode to responsible decadence that once again made Hozier’s haunting wail unavoidable across multiple radio formats. The song (from his now ironically titled Unheard EP) became a runaway prerelease success in snippet form on TikTok, then on streaming services once the full song dropped in March, and then on the Hot 100 in April as it debuted at No. 5 and eventually did “Church” one better by topping the chart three weeks later, as well as the Pop Airplay and Rock & Alternative Airplay lists. For most artists who have gone 10 years without a major pop hit, its success would have been an absolute godsend — a comeback-marking, career-defining moment of validation.

For Hozier? Eh, it was a nice bonus.

Which isn’t to say that he’s not thankful for the song’s streaming virality or for its subsequent pop radio crossover — the unassuming (and strikingly modest) artist projects only gratitude and humility when talking about his 2024 wins. It’s just that… well, the song’s chart takeover hasn’t really changed his career much yet.

“Ten years into your career, you know there’s going to be busy cycles, you know there’s going to be quiet cycles,” Hozier explains with a shrug.

This year obviously wasn’t one of the latter. He’s speaking to Billboard from Perth, Australia, on election night in America — which, with his jet-lagged sleep schedule, means he woke up in the “dark cloud” of Donald Trump’s electoral map takeover. “It feels like the world is controlled by gray-haired old men,” he says, then adds with a bit of mordant humor: “But in a few years… we can’t dodge coffins forever, you know?”

He has just had some rare time off — about three weeks, during which he recharged with friends and family in the countryside of Wicklow, Ireland, that he calls home — and is now between his two dates in Perth, part of a 12-show run Down Under that will take his total gigs for 2024 into the triple digits.

Still, he says that when it comes to “Too Sweet,” 2024 hardly compares with his first turn in the pop spotlight. “When it was ‘Take Me to Church,’ that was the first song that I ever put out. So I was learning everything about everything all at once, also while trying to keep pace with this train that was moving,” he explains. “That was my whole life, was catching up with that song.”

“Too Sweet,” on the other hand? “It kind of just put wind in the sails of a ship that was already sort of moving,” he says, still sounding unsure of how to best quantify the effect. “It was just like this thing that happened, and it’s been like a cherry on the cake.”

And while Hozier has never seemed one to puff up his own wins, this time his entire team also appears to view the boost from his recent striking success in relatively low-key terms. Caroline Downey, his longtime manager, sums up the impact of “Too Sweet” even more succinctly than the artist himself.

“It was just lovely,” she says. “A lovely surprise.”

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Most artists with a single major hit follow a similar trajectory. Hozier, for the last decade, has not.

For one thing, though his lone visit to the Hot 100 in the 2010s was with “Take Me to Church,” he found greater success on other charts. He established a home base on Adult Alternative Airplay, where he scored six top five hits before the end of the decade — including a second No. 1 after “Take Me to Church” with 2018’s Mavis Staples-featuring “Nina Cried Power” — and he topped the Billboard 200 in 2019 with Wasteland, Baby!, which features the latter track.

More importantly, though, he developed a major live following. Hozier has spent his entire career as a road warrior, gradually leveling up in terms of venue size — and earning lifelong fans with his live combination of low-key charisma and soaring singalongs, elevated by his piercing baritone — but making sure not to skip steps, or markets. “I’ve been doing this 25 years, and I don’t know if there’s another artist at the agency that’s played as many markets as Andrew has played,” says WME senior partner/global co-head of music Kirk Sommer, who oversees his North American touring. “He’s just completely and utterly dedicated to his craft and plays each show as if it’s his last. And he’s really put in the work.”

On his 2023 tour in support of new album Unreal Unearth — his third top three entry on the Billboard 200 in as many tries — Hozier started to really see the fruits of that labor with some of his highest-profile venue plays to date, including his first headlining show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. While he has maintained his Adult Alternative audience from the prior decade, he also picked up a new, younger one on TikTok during the global coronavirus shutdown; they fell for the rock star’s modest Irish countryside lifestyle as much as his poetic lyrics and spirit-­lifting anthems.

“The fans seem to really enjoy that… I guess, like, domestic, sort of silly side of me?” he offers, somewhat incredulously. “During the pandemic, we’d do these kind of live readings on Instagram — I’d maybe read a few poems, or we’d do these Instagram Lives, play a few songs. I think maybe there’s a sort of lasting relationship that [makes it feel] like there’s an element of domesticity to me? And that’s why people are like, ‘Hey, talk to us about the bees that you’re keeping in your garden.’ ”

While Hozier grew to an arena-level headliner and a TikTok sensation, his mainstream profile remained relatively low. Pop crossover was not a priority of his — “I was always wary of attempting to write hits for the sake of writing hits,” he says — and he has never been much of a critics’ darling or a Grammy favorite. (“Take Me to Church” scored a song of the year nod, but he hasn’t been nominated since; “Too Sweet” was snubbed for the 2025 awards.) Consequently, his sustained level of success escaped the notice of some less-plugged-in fans and media.

“We did have one interview he was doing at [a festival] where the interviewer said — I think [Hozier] nearly choked on his coffee — ‘Where have you been for 10 years?’ ” Downey recalls. “You’re going, “He’s about to close the festival tonight. He’s kind of been around…’ ”

Even before “Too Sweet,” though, Hozier’s rising success was increasingly evident — and his influence on a new generation of rootsy, big-voiced singer-songwriters equally hard to miss. In late 2023, he appeared on a new version of Noah Kahan’s Stick Season opener “Northern Attitude” — which not only returned Hozier to the Hot 100’s top 40 (at No. 37) for the first time since 2014, but contextualized him as a key influence on Kahan’s brand of alt-folk and as one of the artists who had laid the groundwork for the latter’s crossover success. And just days before the release of “Too Sweet,” Lollapalooza announced that Hozier would headline the August festival — his highest-profile bill-topping appearance to that point.

“I was like, ‘Well, how is this gonna go?’ ” Sommer says of checking out his client’s ultimately successful headliner turn in Chicago. “How’s it gonna go? There are gonna be people for as far as the eye can see!”

Meanwhile, Hozier was (perhaps unwittingly) developing an increasingly devoted corner of his fan base. The affection held for him in the lesbian community has already been a source of internet incredulity for years — “Why Do Lesbians Love Hozier?” blog explorations date back to the turn of the 2020s — though the conversation went overground this year when Lucy Dacus told The New York Times: “Lesbians love Hozier.” (Hozier, an outspoken LGBTQ+ ally, calls his support in the community “really, really wonderful, really sweet… there’s a lot of humor in it, too, and a lot of self-awareness.”)

Because Hozier’s career momentum was already trending in a positive direction, the success of “Too Sweet” can be interpreted as not just an effect, but also a cause of his recent revival. “The song, I think, is very special — it really connected with people on a lot of levels — so that is a part of [its success],” says Erika Alfredson, head of marketing at Columbia. “But it’s also a little bit of the market [being more open to him] and also a lot of the work that Andrew has done. And I think it very well could have happened with another song of his. This just happened to be the one.”

This helps explain why Hozier and his team are reserved about the impact “Too Sweet” has had on his career. Before the song’s March release, his 2024 tour dates (announced in January) had already sold out — even with its ambitious 100-plus-date routing that included three nights at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., and an unprecedented four nights at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium.

All of this adds up to “Too Sweet,” one of 2024’s biggest hits by just about any metric, essentially amounting to a nonessential luxury for Hozier. While the song’s success — which it achieved much quicker than the slow-burning smash that was “Take Me to Church” — has bowled over Hozier and his team, they’re hard-pressed to cite significant doors the song has opened for the already massive star.

Hozier does point to recent appearances on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and at the iHeart Radio Festival as two particular opportunities that “Too Sweet” may have made possible. But anyway, he says, his calendar was so packed this year that it might have been difficult for him to take advantage of more than that: “Because the tour schedule was already in place when that song blew up, [you’re still] fulfilling everything that you were planning on doing anyway. Your routing is done. So even when you get those invites, it can be a challenge.”

“Does it change [anything]?” Downey wonders aloud when reflecting on the song’s impact. “I guess it just reminds people that he’s there.”

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Since it has worked so well for him so far, could Hozier just follow this career path indefinitely — plugging away as a live favorite, coming back with one gigantic pop smash every 10 years and then returning to business as usual?

“I mean, it’d be fun to be 44 and have a No. 1 hit! It’d be fun to be 54, to be 64… Can you guarantee me the No. 1 when I’m in my 80s?” he asks excitedly in response to the idea. “I’m going to be doing whatever I can to stay alive, man. I’m going to be hiring people to be doing all the weird blood transfusions, [to] hook me up to whatever machine.”

Regardless of whether he can still top the Hot 100 when he’s of retirement age, the plan from day one — which his team has enacted brilliantly over the past decade — was to have Hozier achieve the kind of long-term career stability where he could still be performing at a high level as a sexagenarian.

“ ‘We see you as a Bruce Springsteen — we see you as an artist who’ll still be releasing albums long after I’m gone,’ ” Downey remembers telling Hozier very early in his career. “He’s 34 years of age. We want to see him still working like U2 and Bruce Springsteen and a whole lot of other acts at 64. And the only way that I feel that he can do that is by pacing it. And actually not making decisions based on money and making decisions that are right for his long-term career, not his short-term.”

And while “Too Sweet” might not have had much calculable immediate career impact for 2024 Hozier, it might very well move him closer to that long-term goal. Sommer has noted how Hozier’s social media and streaming stats have spiked since his “Too Sweet” success: between 1 million and 2 million new followers each on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, as well as an additional 30 million followers on Spotify. Those numbers indicated increased fan demand that could turbo-charge Hozier’s already-scorching live success.

“All those [2024] shows sold out instantly,” Sommer emphasizes. “So how much demand was there? How many people were unable to buy tickets at the time? And we really didn’t get carried away anywhere. We didn’t try to exhaust demand anywhere. So I would say that there was still pent-up demand after the March on-sale. And now we have this song…”

All of this has led Sommer to a conclusion that might stun any remaining listeners unaware of Hozier’s recent level-up — and maybe even a few who are: “I’m incredibly confident [that] he’s a stadium-level headliner.”

That may seem like a big leap for Hozier, who has never played a full arena tour in the United States — but Sommer doesn’t see it that way. “A lot of these amphitheaters are bigger than a lot of these indoor buildings,” he says. “You look at the [four nights at] Forest Hills… what’s that, 60,000 tickets? And it could’ve been more? We chose to play some select arenas in places just because we felt that it might be a better fan experience, and [Hozier is] very mindful of the fan experience. So by no means would this be skipping steps in any way.”

Downey says that the current live plan for Hozier (following his Dec. 21 appearance as musical guest on Saturday Night Live, his first since 2014) is to go back on the road next year, “kind of maybe May to October,” including some major festival headlining gigs, with dates to be announced soon. His own upcoming dates aren’t likely to be stadiums, but Downey agrees those are in his future. “I think that stadiums will definitely be on album four,” she says. “And I do think he’s ready… the slow burn, with the 10 years of him touring, has been from starting him small and gradually building and building and building, that he is perfectly comfortable now in arenas, and he’s perfectly comfortable playing to 40, 50,000 people in a field. So a stadium would be just the next step, I think. With ease.”

Hozier allows himself another rare moment of being pumped about his success when discussing this recent run of momentum — capped, if not created, by “Too Sweet” — and “the ambitious feeling of opportunity” that comes with following it up with all eyes once again upon him. “I can do ­whatever I want. I can do something totally different, I can respond to [“Too Sweet”] with something else, or something different… it’s nice,” he says. “It just feels like the sky is open, and ‘Off you go.’ ”

This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.

Grammy-winning vocal group Pentatonix has signed with Republic Records, the label tells Billboard.

“Pentatonix have always stood apart,” said Jim Roppo, president/COO of Republic Corps Collective, in a statement on the signing. “There has never been a vocal group like them, and they’ve been able to completely reinvent both a capella and the holidays to the point where they’re synonymous with both. As a team, we’re so excited to partner with them and help execute their expansive vision for this next chapter.”

Pentatonix, managed by Range Media Partners, was previously signed to RCA.

Over the group’s history, Pentatonix has claimed 11 top 10-charting efforts on the Billboard 200 albums chart, including a pair of No. 1s with its self-titled effort in 2015 and A Pentatonix Christmas, which was released in late 2016 and topped the chart in early January 2017. The ensemble most recently visited the top 10 on the tally with its 2023 best-of set The Greatest Christmas Hits, which hit No. 10 in January 2024. The group’s catalog of songs has collected 6.5 billion on-demand official streams in the U.S., according to Luminate, while its albums have earned 12.5 million equivalent album units (of which 7 million are in traditional album sales). The group has also won a total of three Grammys.

“We’re thrilled to kick off this new partnership with Republic!” said Pentatonix in a statement. “They’ve played a pivotal role in shaping the careers of so many artists we admire. After many great conversations with their team, we’re aligned on a shared vision to elevate our artistry to new heights. Here’s to an exciting journey ahead!”

The announcement comes amid Pentatonix’s holiday tour, which kicked off Nov. 14 at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., and has since hit cities across the country. According to a press release, the vocal quintet’s Nov. 26 show at Madison Square Garden in New York was a sellout. The run of shows concludes Dec. 22 at American Airlines Center in Dallas.

On the recording front, Pentatonix recently wrote an original song for the Netflix holiday rom-com Meet Me Next Christmas, in which the group also appeared alongside Christina Milian and Devale Ellis. The film focuses on the efforts of Milian’s character to snag a ticket to Pentatonix’s Christmas Eve concert in New York.

Mariah Carey was forced to cancel her planned Christmas Time show on Wednesday night (Dec. 11) at Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena after falling ill. In a note to fans posted just hours before showtime, Carey informed her Lambs that the show could not go on.

“Pittsburgh, I am sorry to say, I’ve come down with the flu,” the singer wrote. “It breaks my heart that I unfortunately have to cancel tonight’s show. I love you all so much.” The arena posted a note just before Carey’s announcing the cancellation and telling fans that they will receive an email with refund options.

WTAE spoke to some disappointed fans, who said missing out on the Christmas spectacular was definitely a bummer. “We didn’t get anything telling us that it was cancelled. We didn’t know until we arrived and we saw a paper you know when you get to the entry to get your ticket for it there was a paper taped on,” said a family that had traveled from Youngstown, Ohio.

“I had my whole outfit picked out I was smooth. I was like man, she’s gonna see me, she gonna see me and she aint gonna see me that hurts,” said fan Anthony Mock. Fans had all kinds of feelings in the comments on Carey’s post, including one who showed off the sparkly nutcracker costume he planned to wear and another who has some motherly advice.

“Get well soon! Your health is the most important thing, so please take good care of yourself. Drink some chamomile tea to help you feel better! i know you were really looking forward to the show, but sometimes things happen,” they wrote. “Just remember, you love your fans, and they love you back. They’ll understand and won’t blame you Sorry to hear you’re not feeling well. Your health is the most important thing, so take the time you need to rest and recover. We can always reschedule once you’re better—wishing you a speedy recovery!”

Carey performed in Raleigh, N.C. on Monday, where she was informed on stage that her holiday classic, “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” has hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 yet again.

“Last night on stage in Raleigh, North Carolina, I found out that ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ returned to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100,” Carey wrote alongside a repost of a fan video of her twins, Moroccan and Monroe, handing over a bouquet of celebratory flowers. “I couldn’t have dreamed of a better time or place to celebrate the news than on stage with my amazing fans, my kids and my #Christmastime tour family. I love you and am so grateful to you all,” Carey added.

Carey will have something else to celebrate this week as she recuperates: “All I Want” was also certified 16x Platinum by the RIAA. The singer’s next scheduled show is on Friday (Dec. 13) at Prudential Center in Newark, NJ. The Christmas tour is slated to wind down with two more shows, on Dec. 15 in Belmont Park, NY and Dec. 17 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.