Photo via Olivia Rodrigo’s Facebook
Olivia Rodrigo is smashing glass ceilings in the music industry.
The 18-year-old Filipino American teen pop sensation achieved a major win at the end of last month when her debut song, “Driver’s License,” topped the Billboard Global 200 charts for the fifth week in a row, beating out BTS’s “Dynamite” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to become the longest-running No. 1 track, Forbes reports.
As of today, “Driver’s License” still holds the No. 1 spot, now in its seventh week.
The song has also debuted at No. 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 charts, as well as breaking records for first week streaming across various music platforms like Spotify and Amazon Music.
“Driver’s License” was released to critical acclaim and success on January 8, 2021. Since then, it has amassed over 460 million streams on Spotify and 140 million views on Youtube (as of March 3).
Listeners have offered various theories as to why “Driver’s License” was able to reach such heights only a couple months after its debut, according to The New York Times. Rodrigo already had a strong fanbase due to her roles on Disney shows Bizaardvark and High School Musical: The Musical.
The most dramatic speculation revolves around the question of who “Driver’s License,” a song about Rodrigo’s process of emotional recovery after a breakup, is about. The opportunity for fan theories and celebrity gossip, combined with an acknowledgement of the high quality of the song, helped propel the song to a cultural zenith.
In response to the smashing success of her debut song, Rodrigo had only one thing she could say.
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