Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Short n’ Sweet’ Rollout Is Marketing Genius

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The singer of “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” is faithful at every moment to the sly and witty character she has created for herself.

Pop deployment is a difficult thing to achieve. And few people, in recent times, have done it better than Sabrina Carpenter.

The 25-year-old singer is gearing up to release her sixth album, “Short n’ Sweet,” next month, but it’s already a breakthrough: This week, she scored her first Billboard Hot 100 hit, “Please Please Please.” . The song’s success may be due in part to its music video, in which Carpenter and her rumored boyfriend, Irish actor Barry Keoghan, play a mismatched couple, a deadbeat and regretful partner: he robs banks, while she watches with sadness as she admits that she is in love with a criminal. This follows the remarkable success of “Espresso”, which, although not quite topping the charts, reaching number three, managed to etch a phrase into the zeitgeist in a way reminiscent of “Hollaback Girl” or “Wrecking Ball”. If the song sticks in your head at any point this summer, well, it’s that Sabrina espresso.

The songs are strong. But songwriting alone isn’t enough in the age of virality, and few have recently proven themselves as adept at riding waves of public attention as Carpenter. An early sign, perhaps, was her booking in late 2023 and early 2024 as the opening act on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour of Latin America, Australia and Asia; just having a gig was one thing, but Carpenter cleverly turned each evening into an event. Her single “Nonsense” ends with a three-line, slightly blue, rhyming joke, and each night of the tour she made up a new one, referencing the language and culture of the place she was visiting. (For example, in Buenos Aires: “When I’m in the room, I feel sexy / He’s having fun, he calls me Messi / Argentina, will you be my best friend?”) It was a set-up stage less designed for the stadium. crowd than for PopCrave. And it worked, until her performance on “Saturday Night Live,” in which she joked about a guy having “30 Rock Hard.”

Something here is reminiscent of what Katy Perry once called her own “sexy, sweet side”: it’s a cheerfully innocent joke, delivered with a wink that brings everyone, including Carpenter, in on the joke . (The outros of “Nonsense” are either stupidly clever or brilliantly stupid, and they’re always delivered with cunning and control.) A key difference with Perry, however, is the overriding sense of strategy and cohesion. Perry, when launching an album – as she is doing now, showing up in Paris in a dress with a 100-yard train adorned with the lyric sheet for her next single – will try just about anything. (Most notably, perhaps, was his 96-hour “Big Brother”-style livestream promoting 2017’s “Witness” album: it was a show not to be turned away from that seemed, ultimately , not doing much for the music.)

And it’s hard to blame her: For those with a lower profile than Taylor Swift—which is to say, every other working musician—it’s hard to find the right angle to approach an album launch. In recent months, Dua Lipa has released content, live performances, and various pre-release singles ahead of her new album “Radical Optimism”; Billie Eilish, by contrast, has refused to release any singles before “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”

For Carpenter, the music has connected so far, but the main job she’s done has been establishing a personality and not straying from it. His tweet celebrating “Please Please Please” reached #1 pushed a music fan who said she had “fumbled for a second single”. Although there is a power dynamic at play when an artist complains by name about her critics (and when, as a result, her fans swarm), her sense of vengeance is understandable, as is the feeling that, in a world where people talk with more and more freedom about celebrities, these same celebrities can and will respond. On a lighter note, Carpenter’s team put up billboards in Times Square featuring social media jokes about the singer’s (diminishing) waistline — it seemed less like clapping and more like acknowledging that she knew about the prank and was involved. Just like the album title suggests, she is small and sweet.

Over the past twelve months or so, a number of emerging stars have emerged, many of whom follow a similar pattern. In music – as noted in several articles already – Carpenter was joined this summer by Chappell Roan, whose compelling live performances and understanding of songwriting and ornate aesthetics have made her a star on the rise . And in cinema, new stars, including Glen Powell, Sydney Sweeney, Ayo Edebiri and (especially) Keoghan himself, seem both hyper-aware of their image and unconceited, remaining aware of how they are perceived in order to to be able to perpetually undermine this image. image, remember it’s not that bad. This seems to be the dominant mode of cultivation at the moment, and it’s an attractive one—and one that Carpenter, well on his way to a major career, intuitively understands. She takes writing and performing seriously: the outing, for example, always rhymes, always follows. But she never allows it to become, you know, unfun. It’s a deployment, okay. But that doesn’t sound like a campaign.