Olivia Rodrigo and the fall of Disney’s music machine

By: Kristin Robinson

Published: 2021-01-27

If you’ve been following music news over the past month, you probably know about Olivia Rodrigo.

The breakout star of Disney Channel’s Bizaardvark and the Disney+ show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, Rodrigo has already smashed records with her debut single “drivers license,” released on January 8 through Universal Music Group’s Geffen Records. In its first week, the song boasted the biggest US streaming debut on Spotify and soared to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart; by some reports, it is now the fastest song to hit 200 million streams in Spotify’s history. Such growth has immediately cemented Rodrigo in the public eye as the music industry’s most promising new act.

At first glance, this might suggest that the Disney machine still has enduring power in mass-market pop. But several factors fueling Rodrigo’s rise also highlight how teen entertainment has evolved significantly in recent years — to the point where Disney’s influence in grooming the next generation of young stars actually might not last much longer.

I. The decline of “clean teen”

Upon first glance, Rodrigo is harmless enough: Beautiful, young, the kind of girl-next-door you’d want your kid to take to prom. The 17-year-old singer-songwriter’s fluttering soprano is soft and pure as she sings about rites of passage and unrequited love — concepts that music-industry execs would easily give a thumbs-up. At least for now, she is unmarred by true scandal, and dates only cute boyish co-stars like her ex (and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series co-star) Joshua Bassett, the rumored subject of her breakout hit.

All in all, as far as branding is concerned, Rodrigo is the perfect new girl. But she also signals a true departure for Disney’s darlings with one simple word: Fuck.

Sung not once but twice in the anthemic bridge of “drivers license,” the f-bombs are even more surprising when considering how easily they could be replaced by more family- and radio-friendly terms like “I still really love you babe” or “I still freaking love you babe.” Rodrigo’s choice of fuck is deliberate as a writer and performer. With one word, she asserts that she is not your typical, compliant pop princess like some of her predecessors, attaching her name to a song or a story that isn’t hers.

The f-word also aligns with a much greater shift in the tone of teen media and entertainment as a whole. The squeaky-clean images of 2000s teen-targeted acts like early (i.e. purity ring-era) Jonas Brothers and Selena Gomez have largely fallen out of fashion, in favor of brands that are simultaneously edgier and more grounded in realism. For a generation raised just one search away from any information on the internet, notions of perfection and “clean” teendom become less appealing.Reigning teen queen Billie Eilish and HBO’s Euphoria (starring former Disney Channel actress Zendaya), both major successes in the Gen Z market, are prime examples of this new philosophy in practice.

Similarly, Teen Vogue has grown into a thought leader and model for other young-adult publications — not by filling their pages with clean, bright photo shoots and cutesy stories of love, fashion and high school drama, but rather by treating their Gen Z audience as proper citizens of a tough, divided world, and as the most diverse generation on record. The publication’s strategy is also notably mobile- and digital-first, opting for digital covers on Snapchat instead of a print magazine in order to more effectively capture their young audience base.

In response to this change, some music stars are intentionally trying to distance themselves from their previous, cleaner images. For instance, last month, the Disney-bred pop duo Aly & AJ went back and released an explicit version of their 2007 hit “Potential Breakup Song.” Though Rodrigo certainly is not “edgy” in an extreme sense, she is likewise actively distancing herself from the sterile teendom common in the 2000s and 2010s through her lyrical choices.

Looking at the discography of previous stars who came up through Disney’s promotional machine — including Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato and Jesse McCartney — not one released an explicit song while under contract with the company. For Rodrigo to be granted use of an expletive in her first single should therefore be considered quite monumental for a rising teen queen who emerged from a Disney platform, and is indicative of what both Rodrigo and her Geffen Records team feel is the most effective way to reach the Gen Z audience today. Clearly, the move is working.

II. The decline of Disney’s cable TV and radio empire

Aside from wider cultural shifts in teen media, Disney’s star-making machine itself has also gone through major changes in the last year in an effort to keep up with the times.

Most recently, their kid-friendly station Radio Disney was shut down at the beginning of 2021, after about 25 years in business. In a statement, Disney noted the decision was made to pull the station after taking into account “the fast-evolving media environment that provides more personalized music choices than ever to a generation of young consumers” among other concerns. The last publicly reported audience figure for Radio Disney was 3 million monthly listeners in 2019 — a more than 90% dip from ten years prior, when the station was attracting 30 million listeners a week.

Though Radio Disney once ensured kids got a steady dose of the new, company-made stars that its parent company was pushing, the station no longer holds the same weight today. Specifically, with such a young target audience, the station has struggled to hold relevance as digital apps like YouTube and TikTok have risen to prominence. As early as 2014, surveys were finding that YouTube personalities were more popular among US teens than traditional mainstream celebs. More recently, a 2019 survey from YPulse found that people aged 13-17 use social media as one of their top sources of music discovery, just behind YouTube videos; radio, once seen as the most surefire way to break hit records, trailed as the fifth most popular method of discovery.

Rodrigo’s “drivers license” is just now beginning to hit pop radio due to its success over the last few weeks, but TikTok is where the record truly broke first. With 1.7 million videos and counting made to “drivers license” on the platform, fans have weaved the song into the fabric of their everyday lives — proving yet again that TikTok, not radio, is poised to be this decade’s greatest hitmaker. (Ironically, Disney still hasn’t cracked 500,000 followers on TikTok.)

Another massive promotional loss for Disney’s teen-targeted music business is the quickly diminishing relevance of their cable network, Disney Channel. Back in 2015, Nielsen reported that Disney’s cable channels combined (Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney XD) had an average concurrent viewership of nearly 3 million, ranking it among the top networks in the US. But in the years since then, the channels’ collective audiences have dropped by over 70%, to just 760,000 average concurrent viewers in 2020.

Sweeping programming changes in an attempt to reach more kids at home during the pandemic didn’t help. And with Disney executives increasingly prioritizing the Disney+ subscription service — which already has 74 million subscribers — the cable network’s viewership is expected to fall yet again this year.

Historically, Disney Channel has helped introduce and promote the new music of Disney’s recording artists either during commercial breaks or directly within scripted shows themselves. But with so many other fast-growing avenues to new audiences available online, this element of promotion is no longer a major consideration for an artist looking to sign a recording contract with Disney.

III. The decline of Hollywood Records

The most essential element of the Disney machine, however, is Hollywood Records, one of the company’s owned-and-operated record labels.

Started in 1989 as part of the Disney Music Group (which also includes the film-focused Walt Disney Records and country-focused Buena Vista Records), Hollywood Records produces the company’s teen-targeted music, and was responsible for debuting the music of popular acts like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Jesse McCartney and Demi Lovato in the mid- to late 2000s.

Though the exact stipulations of these artists’ contracts are not public, it appears that each of them released exactly four albums under Hollywood Records before moving on to other label contracts:

A few artists from the same era skipped the Hollywood Records rung on the Disney ladder — including the Jonas Brothers (direct license to Republic Records) and Mickey Mouse Club alums Britney Spears (RCA Records, formerly Jive Records and Zomba Recording) and Christina Aguilera (RCA Records) — but this approach was still relatively rare, especially for teens who were already deeply embedded within the Disney machine.

Fast-forward to today, though, and skipping the Hollywood Records funnel altogether might be the rule, not the exception. Sabrina Carpenter, a more recent example of a Disney kid (Girl Meets World, Sofia the First, Milo Murphy’s Law) turned pop singer, did do the standard four-album stint with Hollywood Records before moving to Island Records for her latest single “Skin.” But most of her peers have gone in a different direction.

Zendaya released just one album with Hollywood Records in 2013 before moving on to greener pastures in TV and film. Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett sidestepped Hollywood Records entirely; the former released her first song as a solo recording artist with Geffen Records, while the latter has already put out three singles on Warner Records, including “Lie Lie Lie” earlier this month. (In a classic teen love-triangle story, “Lie Lie Lie” and “Skin” are understood by many fans to be rebuttals to “drivers license,” given that Carpenter and Bassett are rumored to have dated last year… but that’s for a whole other article.)

Notably, Disney is not listed as a distributor or co-owner of any of Rodrigo’s or Bassett’s copyrights for their solo music. The artists’ press releases also do not mention a partnership with Disney in any capacity, other than a brief mention that they were part of a Disney+ show.

Modern teen stardom is its own phenomenon

The above trends raise a few questions. Firstly, why would Disney allow more and more of its teen stars to slip away from their Hollywood Records roster? For a company known to make cunning business choices, it feels like a misstep, and also makes it unclear whether Disney had much to do at all with the runaway success of recent breakout stars like Rodrigo.

Of course, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series was a solid springboard for Rodrigo and “drivers license,” but it would be a disservice to her talent and appeal to say the show’s popularity alone accounted for her recent success. The viewership of the HSM:TM:TS premiere was a combined 2.8 million when it debuted live on ABC, Freeform and Disney Channel concurrently on November 8, 2019. In comparison, “drivers license” was streamed a record-breaking 15.2 million times on Spotify in a single day on January 11, 2021. Meanwhile, co-star Bassett — who had the same platform going into his solo career as Rodrigo — has earned only around 22 million Spotify streams across all three of his singles in the last nine months.

This leads to the second question: Can Disney remain relevant in the music industry in the future? Of course, the Walt Disney Company as a whole still owns many influential entertainment franchises that could offer a significant streaming bump to music partners, as Black Panther did for Interscope Records or Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse did for Republic Records. That said, these placement opportunities apply only to Disney’s family-oriented films, seem available only to established rather than emerging or younger artists and are not always guaranteed.

Once a proven, vertically-integrated music promotion machine — pushing out stars on their self-owned label, giving artists priority placement in their brick-and-mortar stores and ensuring airtime on their self-owned radio station and cable channel — Disney can no longer promise as much to aspiring pop stars as it used to. In fact, many of these traditional benefits now seem like a relic of the past.

Case in point: The swift rise of Rodrigo’s “drivers license” was driven by a mix of TikTok videos, exciting teen drama and tasteful boundary-pushing — not to mention, it’s just a great song. Though she has the Disney pedigree, this is not the company’s win to claim. It’s just Rodrigo’s.