1 on the Billboard album chart and established Rodrigo as one of the finest purveyors of breakup songs in the modern era. Rodrigo followed up “Drivers License” with two more hit singles, and then a début album called “ Sour,” released in the spring of 2021. The song quickly broke streaming records, clocking the single highest number of streams during a single day (holiday music excluded) on Spotify. It’s a song that deeply satisfies the core requirement of great pop music-and pop music’s youthful fans-which is to make the mundane feel cinematic: “Yeah, today I drove through the suburbs / And pictured I was driving home to you,” Rodrigo sings. Rodrigo became a bona-fide pandemic-era success with her début single, “Drivers License,” from 2021, a piano power ballad that is both sweeping and finger-snappy, a post-breakup rumination rendered with unusual clarity. One rare exception to this dispiriting paradigm shift is the twenty-year-old former Disney star and vocal powerhouse Olivia Rodrigo. Given the nature of streaming, and of the TikTok algorithm in particular, the music business has never seemed more gameable-but the ability to create a viral smash on TikTok has also, perversely, led to an oversaturated landscape in which everything feels especially fleeting. “Each person I talk to in the industry is more depressed than the person I talked to before them,” one manager said. The bigger challenge, though, was to find young artists who could break through the noise of the Internet and create the sort of genuine, lasting fandom that turns them into household names and sells out arenas. The sources explained that they could successfully sign loads of new talent and even create digital-era hits that generate millions-if not billions-of streams. They noted that it had become near-impossible to “break” new stars. Many of those interviewed lamented one unsettling shift in particular-a shift that the label executives themselves were no doubt complicit in creating.
Last month, Billboard published a gloomy survey of record-label executive sentiment about the state of the music industry.
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