Ahead of her second album, Guts, in September, Olivia Rodrigo put out ‘Vampire’ as the lead single in June. With 53 million monthly listeners on Spotify, where four tracks from her debut album have had 1 billion+ plays each, this was a campaign that was always going to be pushing on an open door.
It is, however, the reckless or the naive who presume that everything they put out is going to be as successful, or more successful, than what they have released before. Hence this being a belt and braces campaign for her return.
The first major platform turned to was YouTube, where she has 11.5 million subscribers and where her debut single, ‘Drivers License’, in January 2021, really started to take off. She invited fans and creators to the YouTube studios in Los Angeles to premiere the video for ‘Vampire’ and tied into YouTube Shorts with the #vampireOR2 challenge.
The official video for ‘Vampire’ had over 30 million YouTube streams just two weeks after release. The Shorts section on her YouTube page is packed with clips – 16 so far – related to the build up and launch of ‘Vampire’.
The bulk of the videos teasing or pushing the track have views in the hundreds of thousands, but the ones marked with the #vampireOR2 are the ones that race into the tens of millions of views. The UGC side of it has fans dressing up as vampires or reacting to the tracks, but the engagement here is relatively low, with just over 2,000 videos posted on YouTube with the associated hashtag.
YouTube Shorts has been around for almost three years so this can’t be easily wafted away as “early days” for user engagement on the platform. There is, in view terms, a massive disconnect between what a major pop star posts on there and what fans post on there. Rodrigo’s fans seem, in this case, very happy to watch and share a pop star’s YouTube Shorts videos, but they seem dramatically less inclined to make their own response or reaction videos.
The official side of Shorts can do incredibly well, but the UGC side may be lagging. Perhaps this is down to slowly moving consumer habits. A look on TikTok suggests that UGC videos there using the hashtag have a lot more engagement.
The lesson here is that shifts in the deeply embedded habitual behaviour of consumers on social platforms is not necessarily swayed much (if at all) by pop star requests, even huge ones like Rodrigo.
