"Shake It"
Miley Cyrus's brother and Mitchel Musso's brother met on the Hannah Montana set, put a song on MySpace, and three years later owned summer 2008 with a neon pop-punk single: number 10 on the Hot 100, double platinum, and a video staged like The Warriors with dance crews in place of gangs.
Metro Station began in 2005 when Mason Musso and Trace Cyrus met on the set of Hannah Montana, where Mason's brother Mitchel and Trace's sister Miley and father Billy Ray all worked. Cyrus brought in keyboardist Blake Healy, and after they put "Seventeen Forever" on MySpace, drummer Anthony Improgo joined. The band climbed to the top of MySpace's unsigned-band chart, which is where a Columbia Records intern found them; they were signed in late 2006. The self-titled album, produced by S*A*M and Sluggo and made with the Postal Service and the Killers in mind, arrived September 18, 2007.
"Kelsey" and "Control" came first without troubling the Hot 100. "Shake It," the third single, was released April 1, 2008, and became the band's first charting song, peaking at number 10 on the Hot 100 that June. It was certified gold on June 13, platinum later in the year and double platinum by the end of January 2009, went top ten in Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan and the UK, and has sold over 1.2 million copies in the US. All four members wrote it — in E major at 150 beats per minute, though they play it live in D — and the lyrics are, not subtly, about sex. Digital Spy's Nick Levine called the chorus "big, chanty and as easy to resist as a Krispy Kreme donut being dangled down on a rope in front of your PC". The album, nine months old, finally charted, at number 39.
Fans made the video before the band did. Sixty-three homemade versions were collected in a playlist on Metro Station's YouTube channel before Josh Forbes's official clip appeared on June 5, 2008: rival dance crews squaring off in the Los Angeles Theatre, cameos from Jeffree Star and Cyrus's ex-girlfriend Hanna Beth, the police clearing everyone out at the end. MTV called it "the musical equivalent of Snakes on a Plane." In November 2009 the band joined Miley's Wonder World Tour.
That tour is where it came apart. Healy left midway through and Improgo a month later, and in March 2010, after studio disputes between Musso and Cyrus, the band went on hiatus. Musso kept the name and carried on; Cyrus returned in 2014 and a second album, Savior, followed in 2015, before a 2017 tenth-anniversary run, a breakup, and yet another reunion in 2019.
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The Disney Channel sitcom where Miley Stewart lived a secret double life as pop star Hannah Montana, complete with the unforgettable theme "The Best of Both Worlds." It premiered March 24, 2006 and ran until January 16, 2011, launching Miley Cyrus's career and creating a merchandising phenomenon.
MySpace
MySpace launched in August 2003 and became the social network that swallowed the mid-2000s internet — where everyone's first friend was Tom. Top 8 rankings sparked drama, profile songs played on auto-load, and DIY HTML customization meant glitter graphics and autoplay music ruled. Bands broke careers there; it was the most-visited website in the US by 2006.
Emo / Scene-Kid Wave
The mid-to-late-2000s youth subculture built around emo and pop-punk bands like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and Dashboard Confessional. The look: long side-swept bangs over one eye, black skinny jeans, band tees, studded belts, thick eyeliner, Converse, and dyed or straightened hair. It lived on MySpace through dramatic high-angle selfies and Top 8 drama, shaping a generation's teenage aesthetic.
Boys Like Girls
"The Great Escape" blasting out of every car in the high-school lot in the summer of 2007, and a Taylor Swift duet two years later. Boys Like Girls were the MySpace-era pop-punk band that did it the MySpace way — demos uploaded from Andover, Massachusetts, a record deal within months, and a debut that sold under 1,500 copies its first week before going gold.