All artists, singles and albums were awarded points based on their rankings on Billboard's weekly charts, with all those points totaled to arrive at the year-end leaders. It's a system that tends to favor slow-rising records with long chart runs over those that peak quickly. For example, Paula Abdul's "Rush Rush" spent five weeks at No. 1 last summer, but wound up the year only at No. 4 behind Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up" (No. 2), which never hit No. 1 at all but spent many weeks in the Top 10.

1. Mariah Carey: Last year, Carey checked in at a respectable No. 21 in her first year on the charts. This year, she soared all the way to No. 1 thanks to a double-barreled combination: Her "Mariah Carey" was the year's No. 1 album, and she also was the year's top pop singles artist with four of the year's top songs: "Someday" (No. 13), "Emotions" (No. 22), "I Don't Wanna Cry" (No. 26) and "Love Takes Time" (No. 69). Her Billboard blitz included No. 1 rankings in the categories of top female pop singles artist, top female album artist and top adult contemporary artist. Carey also ranked as No. 3 among top R&B artists.

2. Garth Brooks: This top country star benefited from Billboard's midsummer switch to a new computerized system for compiling the album charts, which instantly pushed a trio of his records higher on the list than they had been under the old, pop-dominated system. Amazingly, Brooks got enough year-end points to make it to No. 2 overall even though he had no singles on the pop charts; all his strength came from three albums: "No Fences" (No. 2), "Garth Brooks" (No. 34) and the recently released "Ropin' the Wind" (No. 79), which will likely be much higher in next year's rankings. Together, they made Brooks the year's top album artist, which was the best showing by a country star since Kenny Rogers did it in 1981.