A young actress steps onto a stage, but she is not herself. She wears a blonde wig, calls herself Hannah Montana, and the audience screams for a person who does not exist outside a television screen. By October 24, 2006, that fiction had become a commercial fact: Walt Disney Records released the soundtrack to the first season of the Disney Channel series Hannah Montana, and the record industry had to take a fictional pop star seriously.
From pilot episode to soundtrack
The show had premiered on Disney Channel on March 24, 2006, and the pilot episode drew 5.4 million viewers, the channel's biggest audience at that point. Production on the soundtrack began a month after the series premiere. Of the album's thirteen tracks, the young actress Miley Cyrus sings eight, each credited to her character Hannah Montana rather than to herself. The line between performer and role was already blurring before the record reached stores.
The music itself leaned into pop-rock, with flashes of teen pop, pop-punk and country-pop. The lyrics circled around girl power, teenage crushes and the double life of a character who hides her fame behind a wig. Two songs, The Best of Both Worlds and This Is the Life, spelled out that split existence directly. The final track, I Learned from You, paired Miley Cyrus with her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, and gave the album a family note that critics said was influenced by Vanessa Carlton. The album also made room for other voices. The Click Five, Everlife, B5 and Jesse McCartney each recorded one song, and tracks like "If We Were a Movie" and "I Got Nerve" leaned into romantic longing and girl power. On March 20, 2007, the record was reissued as a two-disc special edition with the bonus track "Nobody's Perfect" and a DVD of behind-the-scenes material and a music video.
A number one debut on the Billboard 200
How could a made-up singer compete with flesh-and-blood pop acts? The first single, The Best of Both Worlds, arrived on March 28, 2006 and reached 92 on the Billboard Hot 100. That was a modest start. The real shock came when the full album landed: it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 281,000 copies sold in its first week. No television soundtrack had ever opened at the top of that chart before.
No television soundtrack had ever opened at the top of that chart before.
The album held the top spot for a second week, moving another 203,000 copies. It became the first of five Miley Cyrus albums to reach number one in the United States. By January 2014, American sales stood at 3,736,000 copies, earning a triple platinum certification from the RIAA. Among television soundtracks, only High School Musical had sold more. A record built around a fictional identity had outlasted many real careers. The album's reach stretched well beyond the United States. It went gold in Canada and the United Kingdom, reached number 9 in Hungary in 2009, and charted in Australia, New Zealand, France, the Netherlands and Denmark. A limited edition added a bonus DVD with five music videos, giving fans another way to collect the Hannah Montana world.
Producers Matthew Gerrard, Antonina Armato and Tim James shaped a sound sharp enough to please critics, who praised the production even when they found the songs uneven. Metacritic gave the album 66 out of 100, a generally favorable score. The packaging of the character, the show and the record worked as one machine: the actress toured as an opening act for The Cheetah Girls, then launched her own Best of Both Worlds Tour across 2007 and 2008.
That tour grossed 54 million dollars, and its concert film added another 63 million. The fictional pop star had become a real touring business. The wig stayed on stage, but the numbers belonged to Miley Cyrus. What began as a Disney Channel gimmick had rewritten the rules of what a soundtrack album could do.