Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana’s “See You Again” is currently stalling just above the top 40 in the Billboard Hot 100. Considering that the original digital release of Disney’s High School Musical saw the immediate rise of about half of its tracks onto the Billboard charts, this isn’t too surprising. Disney has, in fact, had a lot of natural crossover from the otherwise sealed-off quarters of its own media stations (including Radio Disney and, maybe even more significantly, its cable TV channel, where music videos can meet or create demand for a Disney-produced song)—songs by Aly & AJ, Ashley Tisdale (of HSM), and Vanessa Hudgens (ditto) have all had some chart success following their marketing through Disney media. Often a single (such as Aly & AJ’s “Rush” from late 2005) is popular “inside” Disney for weeks or months before crossing over to other charts.
The difference, as I pointed out in my year-end musings, is that aside from releasing it with this year’s “Hannah Montana” soundtrack (on the second disc, Meet Miley Cyrus), Disney hasn’t touched “See You Again.” According to their own airplay charts, it’s gotten essentially zero spins on Radio Disney, and it still isn’t even eligible to be voted into the Top 30. Its only possible presence on the station would be as a write-in candidate.
This situation isn’t just unusual—it’s pretty much unprecedented. Disney has so far (i.e., since the launch of Hilary Duff’s music career c. 2003) had such tight control of the media originating from their own record labels that their decisions as to what to promote and when can make or break a homegrown star even with a large following. Hilary Duff’s new album was largely ignored, except for her perfume jingle/dance-pop single “With Love,” and consequently she’s all but vanished from Disney’s radar, a la Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. Miley, meanwhile, remains one of Radio Disney’s most-requested artists. She currently has three songs in their Top 30, and sixteen eligible for voting, nearly all of which have featured in the Top 30 in the past year.
And yet no “See You Again” on Radio Disney. I don’t get it. I’m going to walk through my thought processes here:
• One possible reason “See You Again” could do well on the charts as a non-single is similar to the reason High School Musical did: people download the song en masse, enough to get it onto charts that take downloads into consideration, then radio stations pick up on the popularity and start playing the song.
Even granting that “See You Again” was recently the most popular Miley Cyrus download on iTunes, this theory doesn’t actually pan out. Although there are non-singles that suggest this path is possible (“My Humps” is a good example), HSM is also a good refutation to this claim, because its anomalous placement on the Billboard charts—despite being fodder for a Disney media thinkpiece or three—didn’t result in any airplay outside of Radio Disney. More importantly, the success of “See You Again” happened the other way around; that is, it started with patches of local airplay and slowly built a reputation. The trajectory is similar to the belated success of P!nk’s “U and UR Hand,” which gestated with middling-to-no support for almost a year before rising nearly to the top of the Billboard charts.
• Barring some truly convoluted and sneaky Disney marketing plan that involves most major radio networks except Radio Disney, “See You Again” is getting airplay because lots of people liked it and requested it.
The obvious question this raises is, if these “See You Again” fans love the song so much, why aren’t they calling in to Radio Disney to request the song? Is there some strange demographic gray area including lots of Hannah Montana fans who take enough interest in pop and pop radio to request the song to, e.g., Z100 (and only one specific album track at that) but don’t take enough interest in Disney to pay attention to its radio station? Is the deck even more stacked at Radio Disney than is immediately apparent (i.e., their weekly new music feature is heavily—to the point of absurdity—weighted toward Hollywood Records and Disney-related releases)? If so, how does this explain sustained novelties like Crazy Frog and Hampton the Hampster that, until recently, were multi-year continuous Radio Disney mainstays?
• “See You Again” traveled through a fan network that worked independently of Disney’s marketing machine (including its major TV and radio channels).
So here we’re finally at what I think is truly significant about this song, if we can grant that the aforementioned sneak-marketing attack probably isn’t the case—I wouldn’t put this out of the realm of possibility, but it does seem like the least logical explanation I can think of, given Disney’s clunky and remarkably un-savvy marketing approach. What matters here is that “See You Again” is the strongest evidence I’ve yet encountered that there exists a network of fandom that pledges allegiance to Disney and its stars by choice, and has the means to mobilize independently of Disney’s marketing influence.
What I’d tentatively argue—based mostly on my own experiences comparing mainstream news media thinkpieces on children’s media to the relatively strange behavior from “within the bubble” of Disney-pop (that is, with my own personal investment in and regular observation of Disney-originating music)—is that Disney-pop in particular (and perhaps teenybopper-geared-pop in a more general sense) is treated only as a broad network of collective mobilization and almost never as a constellation of individual choices (I wrote in more detail about makeshift teenpop anthropology here).
Music journalism usually assumes that smaller networks of individual choices influence future mass popularity—the journey of a MySpace or independent label artist into the mainstream and onto the charts, for instance. But a product from Disney “starts at the top,” with an assumed audience of fans. The individual trajectory of, say, “See You Again” (or Miley Cyrus) shouldn’t have the rock-critic-standard journey from obscurity to success. But it’s this rags-to-riches (or, more accurately, small-popularity to big-popularity) narrative that has the most to tell us about how a small network “cascades” (to use terminology of network science cheerleader Duncan Watts) to mass popularity within lots of networks, which is exactly what seems to have happened with “See You Again.”
From our individual vantage points as listeners, and perhaps especially as commentators, it’s far more difficult to make that next step and do wider-ranging, and methodologically messy, social analysis of the influence of networks of fans after the cascade, yet this is precisely what most coverage of Disney media successes tends to do. In part that’s because most music journalists don’t watch the cascades happening (e.g., acts working their way up the Radio Disney charts). Kid mobilization is usually depicted as having a corporate face—a pair of mouse-ears—that determines the collective choices of the social network; Disney’s marketing decisions stand in for the preferences and decisions of their audience base. I’m not denying the impact of Disney’s own heavy-handed marketing strategies outright, having seen firsthand how rigorously Disney will market utter pieces of crap into bona fide in-house hits (including two mediocre Hannah Montana side-projects currently in the Top 30 chart). But it’s not the whole story.
What I think the popularity of “See You Again” might have done is remove Disney from the equation, leaving us with an almost exclusively fan-based, or at least fan-initiated, chain of actions. In other words, “See You Again,” despite its origins as a Disney product (with the wide, immediate, “inside” audience this implies), has taken the mouse-ears off of the social network, which in turn allows us to more accurately gauge how the network itself works. It also suggests far more fluidity between demographic groups than a quick look at recent Radio Disney playlists might suggest—sustained semi-grassroots support of an album track can only happen when people outside the direct influence of the Disney media outlets catch on, too.
The trick, then, and what’s been frustrating me lately, is figuring out who these “original” Hannah Montana fans are that have been lobbying for the song from the start (Miley has said that it’s her personal favorite song, so perhaps she did some of her own evangelizing independently of Disney’s marketing department—but I can’t find any concrete evidence that there was an actual campaign for airplay). And, subsequently, figuring out how the song caught on, even with people who are generally ambivalent toward Disney product. (Perez Hilton is a good example of a latecomer; I’d call him an influential supporter, except the song had already made its way up the charts by the time he “discovered” it.) One explanation, obviously, is that “See You Again” is Miley’s best song by some margin, but in terms of a trend, I’m not convinced that its quality has anything directly to do with its popularity. (I imagine audiences could have just as easily chosen “East Northumberland High,” the second-best track from Meet Miley Cyrus.)
What I think more time and more information might help sort out is the number and nature of possible lifelines to the rest of the world that Disney fans have thrown from within the parallel music universe bubble. The success of “See You Again” reminds me, along with Lil’ Mama’s “Lip Gloss” and “Chicken Noodle Soup” and “Crank That” in the world of Top 40 radio, that Disney’s not the lone key to a younger demographic and their novelty tunes. So, in theory, the company itself could crash and burn as a children’s media monopoly without us all having to throw the bubblegum out with the bathwater. Where else to find a Hannah Montana (or a Crazy Frog, RIP) is another matter entirely.
Unrelated note: My all-diabetic girl group The Beaties will be holding auditions for new members on January 23rd in Philadelphia. Type 2’s will also be considered. Email dmoore1 (at) gmail (dot) com for details. Ride the pump!!
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