Mariah Carey has established herself as a diamond diva and Songbird Supreme with multiple awards, record-breaking performances and over 200 million records sold. As a singer-songwriter and producer, she used her five-octave range and whistle register to become one of the most successful artists in music history, while also taking time to become a mother, an actress, and a best-selling author.

Born in Huntington, New York, on March 27, 1969, Mariah Carey was raised in the Long Island town, learning music in elementary school and writing lyrics as well as creating demos during her time at Harborfields High School, where she graduated in 1987. She moved from Long Island to New York City to further pursue her music career and got her start singing backup for Brenda K. Starr, who helped introduce her to Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola at a party in December 1988. Carey gave him her demo tape and he signed her shortly after a bidding war ensued.

On June 12, 1990, Mariah Carey released her self-titled debut album, which stayed on top of the Billboard 200 chart for eleven consecutive weeks and went on be certified 9x platinum in the US while selling over 15 million copies worldwide. The album’s first four singles—“Vision of Love”, “Love Takes Time”, “Someday” and “I Don’t Wanna Cry”—all topped the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. She released her sophomore album Emotions the following year and the title track became Carey’s fifth consecutive #1 single, making her the first artist to achieve that feat. “Cant Let Go” reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and “Make It Happen” was a Top 5 pop hit. In 1992, she appeared on MTV’s Unplugged, and her live cover of The Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” became her sixth #1 pop single. An MTV Unplugged EP was produced and hit #1 on multiple international charts.

After dating for a few years, Carey married Tommy Mottola on June 5, 1993, and two months later, she released her third album, Music Box, which featured the #1 singles “Dreamlover” and “Hero”. Music Box became Carey’s first Diamond album, selling over 10 million copies in the US and over 35 million worldwide. The following year, Carey released her Merry Christmas album, which has become the best-selling Christmas album of all time at 9x Platinum in the US with more than 25 million sales worldwide thanks to its lead single, the Diamond-selling contemporary Christmas staple “All I Want For Christmas is You.” In 1995, Carey released another Diamond-selling album, Daydream, featuring the #1 pop singles “Fantasy”, “Always Be My Baby”, and “One Sweet Day”, the duet with Boyz II Men that held the record for remaining at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for 16 consecutive weeks.

In 1997, Carey released the Butterfly album as she was in the process of separating from Tommy Mottola. Butterfly was seen as a pushback to her pop productions overseen by Mottola as she worked with more hip-hop producers and artists such as Puff Daddy, Trackmasters, Q-Tip, Missy Elliott and singing over a sample of Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Pt. II”, but she was tapping more into the hip-hop she listened to regularly. The album was certified 5x Platinum in the US and yielded the #1 pop hits “Honey” and “My All.” The following year, she released the #1’s compilation, featuring the new songs “Sweetheart” with Jermaine Dupri, a remix of her Butterfly song “Whenever You Call” with Brian McKnight, the Brenda K. Starr cover “I Still Believe”, and the Babyface-produced “When You Believe”, a duet with Whitney Houston from The Prince of Egypt soundtrack. In 1999, Carey released her seventh album, Rainbow, another international multi-platinum success featuring the #1 pop hits “Heartbreaker” with JAY-Z and “Thank God I Found You” with Joe and 98°. Billboard named Mariah Carey the Artist of the Decade.

Carey left Columbia in 2000 and signed a recording contract with Virgin Records reportedly worth $80 million for four albums. Before the release of her first feature film Glitter in 2001, she suffered a physical and emotional breakdown and was hospitalized for severe exhaustion. Following the film’s poor reception, she was bought out of her recording contract for $28 million by Virgin’s parent company EMI after only nine months and one album, the Glitter soundtrack. She signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Island Records in 2002 and released the platinum album Charmbracelet in December, which received mixed reviews and yielded no #1 singles. Carey made a strong comeback in 2005 with The Emancipation of Mimi. The album’s second single, “We Belong Together”, became her most successful single of the 2000s. The song spent 14 nonconsecutive weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, won several awards, including Grammy Awards for Best R&B Song and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, “Song of the Year” from the ASCAP Awards and BMI Awards, and it was later named “Song of the Decade” by Billboard.

Through Island Def Jam, Carey released several albums and singles, including the #1 single “Touch My Body” from 2008’s E=MC², before releasing her fifteenth studio album Caution in 2018 through Epic Records. On a personal note, Carey married Nick Cannon on April 30, 2008 and gave birth to their twins, son Moroccan and daughter Monroe, on April 30, 2011 before she and Cannon divorced in 2016. She also ventured back into acting, appearing in the 2009 film Precious as a social worker, a role that won Carey a Breakthrough Actress Performance Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. After years of performing on tour and in residencies, and releasing her #1 New York Times Best Seller memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey in 2020, Carey returned in 2025 with the album Here for It All, which was released through Gamma and led by the singles “Type Dangerous” and “Sugar Sweet” with Kehlani and Shenseea.

Mariah Carey was influenced by singers such as Aretha Franklin, Minnie Riperton, The Clark Sisters, Stevie Wonder and George Michael among others, while she herself has influenced a generation of artists, including Beyoncé, Rihanna, Brandy, Ariana Grande, Christina Aguilera and Kelly Clarkson to name a few. She is one of the most successful artists in music history, selling over 200 million albums worldwide and receiving many awards over her decades-long career. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015 and inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020. She holds several Guinness World Records, including being the first solo artist to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart in four consecutive decades. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked her #5 on their list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.