If you've lived on Earth recently, you've probably heard that Olivia Rodrigo just dropped her debut album, "Sour". I've since had so many conversations about how insanely successful she's been for a brand-new artist. My friend and I marveled at the cultural reset her first single, "Driver's License", created, and every time she drops anything new, it is my entire Tik Tok for you page for at least two weeks. And at just 18 years old, her album drop was the fourth-largest Spotify release by a female artist ever. I have never seen someone so successful with their very first releases in my life. The question is: how is she doing this? While my friends and I theorized that she somehow laced all of her songs with something addictive, let's look at all the more realistic things Olivia Rodrigo is doing right.
For starters, it helps that she's ridiculously talented. Her songwriting is detailed, relatable, and striking, and her melodies are easily trapped in your head. I played "Good 4 U" for my boyfriend only twice, and then it ended up in his dream that night. Her songs are catchy and honestly fantastic. She's also an incredible singer, as her "Saturday Night Live" performance of "Good 4 U" was phenomenal. It's much easier to be successful when you're putting out quality music.
The album itself is structured brilliantly too. It's relatively short, less than 40 minutes long, so it's easily streamed multiple times in a day. The tracklist takes you through different stages of a breakup and all of its corresponding emotions seamlessly, while adding in several songs that aren't about losing a relationship, such as "jealousy, jealousy", which talks about the pressure of seeing seemingly perfect people on social media and feeling poorly about yourself because you don't look or live the way they do. She finishes the album with a beautiful piece called "hope ur okay", in which she comforts those who grow up in households that do not accept them and have the "courage to unlearn all of their hatred." Her songs are powerful and relatable, and all fit the "sour" theme beautifully.
Olivia Rodrigo herself is also relatable. She is unabashedly a teenage girl and embraces things so often scorned by media and society. They say there's nothing teenage girls can do without being made fun of, and there's truth in that, so many teenage girl celebrities attempt to distance themselves from the image. Olivia Rodrigo wrote One Direction fan fiction, she's a proud fan of Taylor Swift, and she embraces all of the things that so many girls go through, like female anger, that often gets overlooked or discredited. She doesn't just know her audience, she is her audience, and it helps her really shine through as an artist.
Her familiarity with her audience is especially clear in her marketing, which is brilliant. Her merch is subtle and includes pieces that people would actually wear because they're cute as clothes and could stand alone. She also does really cute things for her fans, like setting up a phone line people could call before the album drop and hear sneak peeks of her songs, or her partnership with Sour Patch Kids. That, too, is super smart, with "Sour" titling the album, even bringing about an online theory that her next album will include her many unreleased love songs, in a production titled "Sweet" (Sour Patch Kids' tagline is "first they're sour, then they're sweet). She also just makes a point to get out and meet her fans at events like Sour Patch car washes.
Olivia Rodrigo is doing everything right when it comes to the music industry. Yes, she already had a small following from her acting work with Disney, but her talent, brilliant marketing, and just plain relatability in being herself is what has truly made her as an artist.
