Robyn Rihanna Fenty, better known by her stage mononym Rihanna, is a Barbadosian singer and songwriter. She was born on February 20, 1988 in Saint Michael,Barbados. Rihanna was born into a family with an alcoholic and drug addict father. This strained her childhood a lot, but thankfully, her health and well-being improved once her parents got divorced when she was 14. She joined a sub-military program as a teenager where she met singer-songwriter Shontelle who was also her drill sergeant. This inspired her to pursue a career in music instead of the military.
At age 15, she formed a group with two of her high school classmates. American record producer Evan Rogers discovered the nameless group, but was most impressed by Rihanna at their audition. So he invited her alone to the US to record demo tapes with him.
In 2005, Rihanna was signed by famous rapper Jay Z’s label Def Jam. Her debut album, “Music of the Sun”, was released in August 2005. It was a moderate industry success.
Her second album titled “A Girl Like Me” came out in April 2006. This one, however, instantly became a massive hit, selling 115,000 copies in its first week alone and reaching the #5 spot on the Billboard 200 list. The most successful tracks on it were “SOS” and “Pom de Replay”. The latter was also one of the first original songs of hers that she produced for her demo tapes.
Since then, the Caribbean pop superstar has put out 6 other studio albums, thus she has 8 in total. The best selling among them has been “Good Girl Gone Bad” from 2007. Meanwhile, her latest project to date was released in January 2016, with the title “Anti”.
Rihanna’s biggest hits to date are "We Found Love" (2011), "Diamonds" (2012), and "Work" (2016). She was also featured on the hit songs "Love The Way You Lie" (2010) by Eminem and "This Is What You Came For" (2016) by Calvin Harris.
In 2012, the media research firm Nielsen found that she is the best selling artist of all time in terms of digital downloads, with 47.5 million digital copies of her songs having been sold. She also dabbled in acting, appearing in movies such as "This Is the End" (2013) and "Ocean’s 8" (2018).