MILAN—She’s bringing disco back.
Olympic champion figure skater Alysa Liu has sparked a streaming surge of Donna Summer’s 1978 disco cover of MacArthur Park, an early indication of Liu’s commercial impact within days of her historic gold medal-winning performance in Milan.
U.S. on-demand streams of Summer’s MacArthur Park across all major platforms surged 505% following Liu’s free skate performance to the song on Thursday, according to data from Luminate. Total streams averaged about 12,000 per day in the six days leading into Liu’s free skate, then jumped to about 115,000 on Friday and 139,000 on Saturday, according to Luminate, an entertainment analytics platform that like Sportico is part of Penske Media Corporation.
Any effects on the song’s Top 100 chart performance have not yet been measured, according to a Luminate spokesman, as the tracking week for chart eligibility concluded on Thursday.
Originally written by songwriter and composer Jimmy Webb in 1967, MacArthur Park became a No. 1 hit in 1978 for Summer, who died in 2012. In posts on Instagram and X, Webb said that “Liu’s energy and youth breathes yet another life into my song” and that “I am unbelievably proud to play some small role in her inspiration.”
Streams of MacArthur Park jumped nearly 1,300% on Spotify the day after Liu’s free skate, and her gala program to Stateside + Zara Larsson by PinkPantheress helped catapult the latter song into the U.S. top 10 charts for the first time, according to a spokeswoman for Spotify. Donna Summer saw an additional streaming boost for her hit Last Dance, the soundtrack to Japanese skater Mone Chiba’s short program.
The streaming success of songs on the back of Liu’s gold-medal skate underscores the potential commercial impact of music choice in figure skating, at a time when licensing issues within the sport have received unprecedented attention. Several skaters in Milan had to alter or create entirely new programs just before the Games due to licensing complications, highlighted by Spanish men’s skater Tomas Guarino’s last-minute struggles to clear music from Minions.
The new emphasis on music clearance followed a landmark lawsuit at the last Winter Olympics. The recording artists Heavy Young Heathens sued NBC, U.S. Figure Skating and a pair of American skaters for alleged unlicensed use of their cover of House of the Rising Sun at Beijing 2022.
Four years later, executives from figure skating governing bodies as well as entertainment agencies say there is heightened interest in potential collaboration between musical artists and athletes whose competitions require song usage.
“Music rights are something that the global figure skating community is going to need to address over the next couple of years,” U.S. Figure Skating chief commercial officer Annie White said, adding that the sport’s national governing body is looking to form partnerships with music labels in the future.
“The music business is changing so much each and every day, but some of these artists I think would probably love to have their music featured” in skating programs, Nick Thimm, agent and board member at CAA, said in an interview shortly before the women’s figure skating competition. “It’s a new landscape that no one’s really thought of, and I always find those things really fun, because it obviously can lead to new business for our clients but also opportunity for shared storytelling.”
That’s how Liu has described her motivation. “I want to be a storyteller of sorts,” she said in Milan. She wasn’t driven by medals but instead the opportunity to create and share choreographed routines she loved. It fits with the 20-year-old’s career arc. A child prodigy who won her first U.S. championship at 13, Liu burned out, retired at 16 and ultimately returned to the sport for the fun of it. She was a breakout star of the 2026 Games, gaining more than 3.5 million new followers on Instagram in the last three weeks.
Liu’s breathtaking MacArthur Park skate in Milan happened almost by accident. She and her team initially choreographed the program for the previous figure skating season to culminate at the 2025 World Championships in Boston, Donna Summer’s birthplace. Most skaters, coaches and choreographers develop new programs for the Olympic season, and are generally wary of recycling “old” programs that judges may have already had the opportunity to evaluate.
Liu began the 2025-2026 season with the intention to perform her long program to music by Lady Gaga, but after performing two versions of it at two different competitions to mixed results, Liu ultimately reverted to MacArthur Park with new choreographic flourishes, including a crowd-pleasing knee-spin in the final climax.
“One of my big goals in skating is to create as many programs as I can. And I created a ton of programs. So I’m hitting all the boxes,” Liu said Thursday, with the gold medal around her neck.
(This has been updated to add information about streaming numbers on Spotify.)
