JoJo Siwa is standing up for herself. The teenaged YouTube sensation took to Twitter to call out Nickelodeon for preventing her from performing her new music during her 37-city D.R.E.A.M tour, presented by the children’s television network.
Siwa begins her Nickelodeon D.R.E.A.M tour in January of 2022, but feels that Nickelodeon has taken away her agency due to discrepancy over which songs the company will permit her to perform on the tour. “My movie musical was just released (with 6 new original songs)… Nickelodeon told told me today that I’m not allowed to perform/add any of the songs from the film into my show,” Siwa tweeted. “These are MY songs, MY voice, MY writing. Does this seem fair???”
The songs at the center of the debate come from Siwa’s movie musical The J Team, which premiered exclusively on Paramount+ in July. In a separate tweet, Siwa wrote, “Working for a company as a real human being treated as only a brand is fun until it’s not.”
Siwa isn’t the first tween star to butt heads with her parent company. After reaching adulthood, Disney child stars like Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez have opened up about the difficulties they had navigating their relationship with the studio while maintaining their personhood. On the podcast “Rock This with Allison Hagendorf,” Cyrus said she felt like “no one cared” about her whenever she was playing herself on Hannah Montana. During this year’s Television Critics Association’s Summer press tour, Gomez said, “I signed my life away to Disney at a very young age.” Gomez has since clarified that she’s “beyond proud” of her time at Disney, but the sentiment remains.
Siwa, for her part, is expanding outside of the Nickelodeon bubble. She recently made headlines for becoming half of the first same-sex couple on ABC’s upcoming season of Dancing With the Stars. Siwa—who came out as a part of the LGBTQ community earlier this year—said that she felt she had the opportunity “to make history and to break down a barrier” by electing to have a female dancing pro as a contestant on the show.
Nickelodeon has not responded to a request for comment.
— Unhappy Little Trees: The Dark Legacy of Bob Ross
— The True Story of a Hollywood Partnership Built and Destroyed by Money, Sex, and Celebrity
— Ted Lasso’s Roy Kent on Why the Show Isn’t “Warm and Fuzzy”
— Caftans, Goyard, and Elvis: Inside The White Lotus’s Costumes
— The Chair Is Like an Academic Game of Thrones
— The Best Movies and Shows Streaming on Netflix This Month
— Rachael Leigh Cook on Reclaiming She’s All That
— Watch Kristen Stewart Channel Princess Di in Spencer’s Official Trailer
— From the Archive: Jeffrey Epstein and Hollywood’s Omnipresent Publicist
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of “Awards Insider.”