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Last week, pop star Olivia Rodrigo played four sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden, where about 20,000 people, mostly young women, transformed New York’s historic arena into a haze of glitter and Doc Martens each night.
It’s been more than three years since Rodrigo catapulted to fame with the smash hit “Drivers License,” a breakup ballad that topped the Billboard charts for eight consecutive weeks from January to the end of March in 2021. For just Aged 17, she was the youngest solo artist in history to debut at number one.
Critics praised Rodrigo’s songwriting, while “Drivers License” quickly racked up billions of views on TikTok and other platforms, serving as the soundtrack for much of 2021. She rushed to write more and released more three Billboard top 10 hits that year. Spotify executives said they had “never seen anything like this.”
Three years later, there hasn’t been another new music star to emerge like Rodrigo did. For music executives, the dry spell is a source of anxiety. “Olivia Rodrigo could be pop’s last superstar,” a longtime music executive recently told the Financial Times.
This is hyperbole. But it seems Rodrigo slipped to the top of pop at just the right time, before a wave of public fragmentation reached his tipping point.
Industry executives say today’s rising stars, who came of age in the streaming age, will likely never reach the same levels of fame and success as the previous generation, when it was easier to get people’s attention. Most of today’s big pop stars are aging millennials. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, the biggest forces in music, have both been working in this industry for about 20 years.
With modern technology, it’s easier than ever to create music from your bedroom. But it’s harder than ever to get a hit, and even harder to maintain it in your career, as music competes for attention with games, influencers, and pretty much everything on the Internet.
“There’s no question that superstars are getting smaller and smaller and will continue to do so,” said Midia analyst Mark Mulligan, who expects “some recalibration” among record labels as a result. That doesn’t mean there aren’t new, young musicians gaining a following. But it’s often on a smaller scale, with more niche fandoms finding their place online.
Consider Spotify’s global chart, which ranks the most played songs on the platform. In this week’s top 20 were some famous US stalwarts such as Ariana Grande and Beyoncé. But the list was also full of musicians from around the world: Chilean reggaeton groups FloyyMenor and Cris MJ, K-pop girl group Illit, Colombian singer Feid and Mexican rapper Natanael Cano.
This isn’t a bad thing. As listeners, by paying about $11 a month we can choose what we want from about 100 million songs with just a few taps on our phones. There are more collaborations and crossovers across traditional lines of gender and geography.
But it’s a problem if you’re in the business of star making. The major record labels – Universal, Sony and Warner – make money by cutting revenue from streaming and album sales from a stable of thousands of musicians. Having big stars gives labels better leverage in negotiating financial deals with streaming platforms.
Universal Music, the industry leader valued at more than $50 billion in stock, is the home of Rodrigo, who signed to Universal’s Interscope Records in 2020. John Janick, the Interscope CEO who also signed Billie Eilish , recently received a big promotion from Universal chief Lucian Grainge, and now runs all of Universal’s West Coast labels.
Executives cite the decline of radio as a major reason for the recent star-making dearth. In the United States, streaming has nearly decimated radio, which was one of the key levers used by record labels to influence which songs became popular. Without this guardian, it is more difficult for them to predict the next blow.
There’s one huge exception to all of this: K-pop and J-Pop. In the world of Korean pop, superstars are still in business. It’s no surprise, then, that Universal recently reached a deal to distribute the music of HYBE, the agency behind K-pop sensation BTS, for the next decade. Universal has signed similar deals with Chinese and Nigerian pop labels in recent months. The world’s largest music company thus makes an implicit bet: the next superstar could emerge far from its headquarters in California.
anna.nicolaou@ft.com