It’s Spotify Wrapped season, and with the colorful reminders of our regrettable music phases throughout the year, come the rankings of Spotify’s top artists and albums. In 2021, Olivia Rodrigo, an 18-year-old rising superstar, brutally dominated the charts.

In 2019, after her work on the Disney show, Bizaardvark, Rodrigo secured a role on the Disney+ series, High School Musical the Musical the Series (HSMTMTS) [1]. And apparently, that success was not enough for her, seeing as when she wasn’t acting alongside her co-star Joshua Bassett, she was cooking up her first hit single, ‘drivers license’. The power ballad details her conflicting emotions after breaking up with her partner, creating a motif out of her drives past their street and the time she spent reflecting upon the relationship after their split. Throughout her songs, Rodrigo translates her heart-wrenching emotions into words and speaks the unspoken truths of heartbreak, which only makes her songs more relatable. It was only a matter of time before ‘drivers license’ began to take the world by storm.

This year, while other 17-year-olds were butchering K-Turns and appeasing driving examiners to receive their own driver’s licenses, Rodrigo’s ‘drivers license’ was steadily working its way to becoming the most-streamed song of 2021 globally [2].

Rodrigo’s songs placed twice on Spotify’s “Most Streamed Songs Globally” list, with ‘drivers license’ at #1, receiving over 1.1 billion streams, and ‘good 4 u’ at #4, receiving over 600 million streams just during the summer of 2021 [3,4]. Now you may be feeling some déjà vu, and that’s because Rodrigo also earned the #1 spot on Spotify’s “Most Streamed Albums Globally” list, with her debut album SOUR, which overtook Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, Justin Beiber’s Justice, Ed Sheeran’s =, and Doja Cat’s Planet Her for the #1 spot [3].

All of this success came shortly after Rodrigo received 7 Grammy nominations, securing nominations in each of the 4 biggest categories: best new artist, song, record, and album of the year [5]. Some listeners may say that Rodrigo, a young singer with little experience under her belt, “stole” the titles from their favorite artists, but Livies, or Rodrigo fans, admit that if her securing both titles was “theft”, then her success would have to be their favorite crime.

Olivia Rodrigo is making waves in the music community right now, and despite the criticism, the up-and-coming hit singer couldn’t be happier. And honestly, Good 4 Her.

Can you find all of the song title references in this article? Hint: there are 7 SOUR titles + 1 bonus title 😉

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8510382/

[2] https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/olivia-rodrigo-bad-bunny-spotify-charts-wrapped-1235122553/

[3] https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-12-01/what-the-world-streamed-most-in-2021/

[4] https://people.com/music/olivia-rodrigo-good-4-u-is-spotify-song-of-the-summer-2021/

[5] https://www.billboard.com/music/awards/olivia-rodrigo-2022-grammy-nominations-1235002423/