drivers license: The song from 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo is breaking streaming records

1/21/21 7:00PM

It's one thing to get your first song release to break into the top 100, it's another to have it go straight to number one and it's even more ridiculous to break the record on Spotify for most streams of any song in a week — but that is what 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo has achieved in the last 10 days.

Her song, drivers license, was being listened to more than 13 million times per day in the middle of last week — making it roughly 3x more popular than the second most popular song on Spotify anywhere in the world, which was Dakiti by Bad Bunny and Jhay Cortez_._

_‍_The magnitude of Rodrigo's initial success may be surprising, but her career as a Disney star cemented her with a legion of fans before she sung a single note. Like so many modern songs, social media platform TikTok then sent the song global. Since releasing the song on January 8th, more than 900,000 individual videos have been uploaded to TikTok, using drivers license as the audio. Among those 900,000 uploads were videos from famous TikTokers including Charli D'Amelio (with her 107 million followers).

Modern music distribution = TikTok.

Good luck for your next single Olivia — it's going to be hard to top that.

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The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.

Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.

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Drake whiffs on an expected No. 1 on Spotify

Drake started at the bottom and he’s here, but not quite at the top... of Spotify, at least.

It’s been nearly three weeks since Drake dropped his three surprise albums — “Iceman,” “Habibti,” and “Maid of Honour.” Heading into the month, prediction markets were rating it a near certainty, a 98% chance, that Drake’s sonic onslaught was enough to snag the No. 1 slot on Spotify at least once in June.

But, while he surpassed the late Michael Jackson and took up three slots on the Billboard album chart at once, his newly released songs haven’t quite cracked the popular music-streaming platform’s top charts, and market seem to think the moment has passed.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

Spotify’s “Top Songs - Global” chart currently show that Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” which is more than four decades old, Justin Bieber’s “Beauty and a Beat,” which climbed back to the top of Spotify charts following his Coachella set in the spring, Olivia Rodrigo’s new angsty love song “The Cure,” and BTS’s “Swim” are all ahead of Drake’s “STFU Janice” from his “Iceman” album.

While Spotify previously reported last month that Drake’s “Make Them Cry” was the most streamed album in a single day this year, that was later revealed to be a data error.

Prediction markets currently show traders are betting there’s only a 15% chance Drake will have a No. 1 song on Spotify in June.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift is in the lead at 98% — a day before the release of her new original song “I Knew It, I Knew You,” which she wrote and performed for Disney and Pixar’s upcoming “Toy Story 5” — followed by Olivia Rodrigo, whose highly anticipated album “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love” comes out next Friday.