On January 8, a teenager immediately released a breakout song that thousands of TikToks launched. Now her song is the biggest in the world.
Teenager Olivia Rodrigo is a 17-year-old actress and singer who became famous this month for acting in Disney + ‘s Secondary Music: The Musical: The Series. The song, “Drivers License,” puts Rodrigo in the path of an experienced Disney-to-pop star (see Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez).
“Driver’s License,” which ended at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, is a modern pop poem in the Lorde or Taylor Swift style, telling the story of a friendship that went well after the narrator get her driver’s license – something a couple had talked about a long time ago. Fans have profited that the song is about her Disney co-star Joshua Bassett, who has been instrumental in the success of the track. (Rodrigo declined to comment, and representatives for Bassett did not respond to a request for comment.)
According to Billboard, it was streamed 76.1 million times and sold 38,000 downloads in the U.S. in the first week of release. On January 11, it set a Spotify chart for most streams in a day (for a nonholiday song) with over 15.17 million global streams. He overcame that manually with 17.01 million streams the next day.
William Gruger, editorial director of TikTok USA for music, said “Driver’s License” was an immediate sensation on stage. In the first week after the single dropped, the number of videos containing the song on TikTok, and the number of views received by those videos, doubled each day.