Sabrina Carpenter isn’t an industry plant – she’s worse

Sabrina Carpenter first emerged in 2014 as a child actress on the Disney Channel. From there, she signed with a record label, becoming yet another entertainer to take advantage of the tween-TV-to-music-charts pipeline (see Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez et al). Ten years and five average albums later, she was known only to a few teenage girls, but over the last few months this has changed. The 25-year-old is now everywhere: music videos, magazine covers, billboards, chat show sofas and, of course, Instagram and TikTok. If you’re under the age of 30, you can’t escape Carpenter. 

Her newfound stardom can be partly explained by her role as the warm-up act on Taylor Swift’s international tour, but among my friends there are whispers of a more sinister scheme. A heated debate has broken out over whether Spotify’s autoplay feature has been feeding Carpenter’s hits to unwitting, even unwilling, ears.