This is a new low for Disney's music marketing team and executives.
Freya Skye's cover of Who Says was released on tiktok about a week ago, which is a week after Jojo Siva released her cover of Karma.
If you don't know the drama there, the short of it is that Jojo did a lot to imply she wrote it, so when it came out that she just bought the rights to it, people were pissed.
Back to Freya, she was hyping Who Says up as a cover on instagram before the Jojo drama started, but when it came time for the actual release, her tiktoks referred to it as "her song" and "new song" instead of a cover, leading people to accuse her of trying to say it's an original song and not give credit to Selena Gomez.
Keeping in mind she's a Disney girl and knowing Disney's tight grip on their stars and their social media, there's no way she was in charge of making those videos or the captions. The social media team at Disney decided that the press and attention they'd get for making it look like Freya was trying to claim Who Says as an original was worth throwing this poor girl under the bus. After all, whether people are streaming Freya's version or Selena's, money's still going into Disney's pocket.
Oh, and they're doing it to Kylie Cantrall's cover of Boo'd Up now, too, even after there was so much backlash against Freya that they had to go back in and edit captions and remove the song from a video that said "my song" in the text.
These poor girls are being chewed up by Disney the same way their predecessors were, even in the wake of Quiet on Set and enhanced public scrutiny of children's entertainment companies. It's absolutely disgusting and I hope Freya and Kylie can get out and get on top now that Disney's actively trying to bomb their careers.
Disclaimer: I do not have any association with the cover artists nor the original artists. None of this work is my own. Please leave likes and comments on the videos and support the original creators.
In case you missed it, a few days ago Dolly Parton came out with a new album containing a whole bunch of cover songs, including this one of Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)"
Other covers on the album include Prince's "Purple Rain", Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball", and Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" featuring Lizzo