Madonna

Madonna Louise Ciccone, known mononymously as Madonna, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress who has dominated popular music since the early 1980s. Born in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to New York City in the late 1970s to pursue dance and music, signing with Sire Records in 1982 and releasing her self-titled debut the following year. Often referred to as the Queen of Pop, she is one of the best-selling music artists of all time with over 300 million records sold worldwide, earning recognition from the Guinness World Records as the best-selling female recording artist. Her career is defined by constant reinvention, musically, visually, and culturally, across more than four decades, with each album era arriving with a distinct aesthetic identity and sound. Critically, her relationship with songwriting evolved dramatically over the course of her career: her earliest recordings relied significantly on outside writers, but from True Blue (1986) onward she became an increasingly dominant creative force, co-writing and co-producing the majority of her own catalog.