Not long after releasing her second chart-topping single, “Señorita,” Camila Cabello is back with a double release: “Liar” and “Shameless.” In an interview with the Zach Sang Show, the pop star spoke about the reasoning behind releasing singles in pairs.
“I’ve always done that,” she said. While “always” might be a slight exaggeration, she is an avid user of the double-single strategy. “OMG” was paired with “Havana”, while she bundled “Never Be The Same” and “Real Friends.”
“I think it’s too much pressure when I haven’t released an album in a year and a half to just put out one song,” the singer told the host. “That’s a bit much for me. I don’t like it… I’m not really like a drop one single kinda gal. I feel like I want to put out more music, more visuals, more stuff because I feel like then it makes you appreciate the one song more because you have context for it.”
She pointed out that both singles tell the same story. “There’s two different sides to it,” she said.
The double-single trend started picking up steam a few years ago, culminating in Ed Sheeran breaking the world record for most Spotify streams in a day with his pair of singles: “Shape of You” and “Castle on a Hill.”
Recently, Vampire Weekend employed the tactic with their latest album, Father of the Bride. Drake, Swae Lee, and The Weeknd have also used the strategy.
Billboard’s Cherie Hu previously reported on the industry phenomenon. Cabello’s label team pointed out how double singles benefit both the fandom and playlisting opportunities. “Each time, we used the data from both songs not just to understand fan engagement, but also to see which tracks were better for growing brand-new audiences on a global level,” Celine Joshua, senior vp of commerce/digital at Sony Music Entertainment, told the magazine.
The duo tracks also helped her team reroute her promotional strategy by sussing out her biggest hit “post-contact” with listeners. “‘OMG’ was the alleged hit single that [Sony] kept submitting to our playlists and insisting would be a big smash,” Mike Biggane, head of pop programming at Spotify, told Billboard. “But by that Saturday morning, we could tell really quickly that ‘Havana’ was the song that audiences were really reacting to. And fortunately, that didn’t mean that ‘OMG’ was doing badly at all.”
Elsewhere in the interview with Sang, Cabello spoke about her upcoming album. “I have all the songs for it,” she said. “I don’t think it needs anything, but I’m always writing because I’m always inspired.”
Listen to the interview above, and catch up on all the lyrics to Camila Cabello’s biggest hits on Genius now.
