On a Thursday in late July, the Funko Hollywood store became an unlikely theatre of cultural anointment. During a press conference livestreamed from the toy-and-collectibles emporium, Peter Roth, chair of the Walk of Fame selection committee, read out the names of 32 entertainers who would be embedded in the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard the following year. The list, approved by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce’s board just two days earlier, ranged from a Colombian reggaeton star to an Italian ballet dancer, from a British actor of Sierra Leonean and Ghanaian descent to two American sisters who grew up on film sets. Each name drew a different kind of ripple through the global fan ecosystems listening in.

Karol G, the first female Latin urban artist to top the Billboard 200, became the latest symbol of a Latin American musical ascendancy that has reshaped the sound of a globalised pop. Her star sits alongside that of the Chilean actor Pedro Pascal, a familiar face from Hollywood’s most profitable franchise series. Latin American press noted the moment as a ratification of the region’s cultural export power. Roberto Bolle, the Italian étoile, framed his inclusion in a different lexicon: “a dream that becomes reality,” he said in a statement, adding that the honour carried “un po' della danza, dell'arte e dell'Italia nel cuore di Hollywood” – a fragment of dance, of art, of Italy into Hollywood’s heart. Bolle becomes the nineteenth Italian artist so celebrated, a quiet marker of the durable prestige of classical dance amid an entertainment economy dominated by pop music and franchise cinema.

While Hollywood prepared its pavement, the pop charts were busy writing their own record books. Bruno Mars’s “I Just Might,” the lead single from his first solo album in nearly a decade, spent its twentieth week atop Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, tying Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” and sitting just behind SZA’s “Kill Bill” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” on the all-time list. Observers in New York and Los Angeles note that Mars’s silky genre-fluidity – the song is simultaneously a pop, R&B and adult-contemporary hit – mirrors the boundary-blurring logic that places a reggaeton idol and a ballet star on the same Walk of Fame class. Mars now has as many weeks at number one with this single as all his previous chart-toppers combined.

Harry Styles, meanwhile, was preparing to transform Mexico City’s Estadio GNP into a vast singalong space for six nights, part of a tour supporting his electronics-inflected album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. The former One Direction frontman has twice been nominated for the Best Pop Solo Performance Grammy, winning once for “Watermelon Sugar.” Trade analysts in London point out that a third nomination would lift him above the tie he currently shares with Mars and Ed Sheeran, leaving only Justin Bieber – with four nods – ahead among male artists. Styles’s trajectory, from boy-band member to solo shape-shifter, illustrates the endurance required to convert early fame into lasting institutional recognition: the star on the pavement or the trophy on the mantel.

For the millions who will eventually kneel to photograph the brass-and-terrazzo stars, the Walk of Fame operates as a tangible archive of popular devotion, a map of shifting tastes from the silent-film era to the streaming age. The Fanning sisters – Elle and Dakota – will become the first pair of siblings to receive a joint ceremony, a detail that turns a marketing tradition into something closer to a family portrait. In a week when reggaeton, R&B, disco-pop and ballet all filed claims to posterity, the lasting image is not the brass itself but the unlikely constellation it forms: a Colombian singer, an Italian dancer, two American child-actresses-turned-leading-ladies, all set to be trodden by unknown feet beneath the same Los Angeles sun.