Post by amg1977 on Oct 13, 2021 9:25:17 GMT -5
If anyone could be called the breakout star of the pandemic, it is Olivia Rodrigo. Olivia began taking vocal, piano, and acting lessons as a young child and became interested in songwriting from listening to Taylor Swift (during Taylor's country period).
After spots in an Old Navy commercial and an American Girl film, she got her big break by landing the role of Paige Olvera in the Disney Channel series Bizardvark (2016-2019). During that run, she made an EP with her costar Madison Hu featuring music from the series. This was, of course, Disney flavored bubblegum pop and was written by Disney staffers.
After the show ended, she signed up to do the Disney+ series High School Musical and immediately began planning her launch into a pop star career. By this point she had become quite the songwriter and wrote a few songs that she sang on the series. One of those, “All I Want” became a streaming hit despite having almost no radio airplay as it streamed over 100 million on Spotify times before her breakout success. Those totals have since risen to 325 million streams.
At this point, Olivia planned her move away from Disney's safe kiddie pop image and signed with UMG/Geffen. Her first single for the label, “Driver's License” was an immediate smash and streamed over 1.1 billion times on Spotify.
The follow-up “Deja Vu” is over 590 million streams and the next single “Good4U” has hit 960 million streams. Her first album, SOUR, shot to number 1 and she pretty much dominated the charts in 2020 in the same manner Billie Eilish did a year earlier. She currently has 8.8 million followers on Spotify, 7.6 million on YouTube, 18.2 million on Instagram, and 11 million on TikTok.
The girl obviously has the ideal talent and personality of a pop star: she is very relatable to teens but is not scary to their parents. For parents recovering from the shock of their little darlings listen to Billie Eilish's odes to suicide and videos worthy of a horror film, Olivia is safe and relatively wholesome. Even if she does throw down the occasional f-bomb in a song, at least she's not getting to know tarantulas up close and personal.
In terms of her future popularity, she is still on the rise and has lots of room to grow. Whether she will by next year reach the absurd heights Billie did is am intriguing question. On the one hand, her mainstream appeal leaves her a wider potential audience but on the other hand she does not present the edgy factor Billie gives to would be rebellious teenagers. Still, the obvious question for Olivia is the same one I asked about Billie a year ago: How do you follow this? She certainly will not be going anywhere for the foreseeable future but can she keep the same level of momentum going with her next release?
From a talent standpoint, she is obviously among the top tier of young female pop singer/songwriters. Her music is not nearly as edgy as Billie's but, in all fairness, it is difficult to separate Billie and her brother while Olivia is flying solo. Both girls' teams have obviously been very successful in terms of guiding their careers.
I think it is a safe bet to say Olivia will continue to have success but when she will peak and how long she will maintain at or near peak level popularity is pure guesswork. As with Billie, we will have to wait for the reaction to another album or two to see whether she can maintain the current levels of success.
From an artistry standpoint, Olivia is churning out near perfect pop with hooks galore in a variety of styles. She has become the queen of teen girl broken heart confessionals and history has show that can take you a long way - ask Taylor Swift. Obviously those early years being inspired by Swift's own early confessionals have paid off big time. She is both a talented singer and songwriter, an excellent business woman, and, as we know, being physically attractive in today's marketplace is always a plus. There will inevitably be a backlash at some point (it happened with Taylor, Arianna, and Billie as well) and how she handles it will say much for her future.
