Another collection of random bits from around the kindie-webs...
-- Perpetual Grammy nominee Bill Harley is offering up another free track. This one is - gasp! - a quarter-century old. It's "I'm On My Way" from his 1986 album 50 Ways To Fool Your Mother and it's a nifty re-working of the old traditional tune...
-- The long-in-the-making "We Are the World"-style jam "A World of Happiness" is finally making its way to the light of day. Joanie Leeds and Tor Hyams released a YouTube video explaining the project, which basically boils down, "a whole bunch of kindie artists lending their talents to a single song to raise money for charity." That works for me. Originally pegged as a Haiti-relief song, now the charity of choice will be picked by a vote.
-- The Wales-based animation studio Planet Sunday, best known here probably for their animation work for The Hipwaders and Debbie and Friends, also helps run their Animation Academy. The Academy (now a non-profit organization, shows kids ages 8 and up how animated films are made and gives them the chance to make their own films. Their most recent workshop resulted in a music video for The Hipwaders. According to Planet Sunday founder Greg David, "The kids and parents really got a lot out of it, and it really improved the format of the day."
They've got two workshops lined up this month, on the 23rd and 25th February. One band is already interested, but they're looking to get someone else on board -- i.e., another kindie band. While David says they try to keep the costs down for kids as much as possible by getting grants and other funding to cover the cost of equipment and materials, etc., if a band would like to make a donation of either money and/or goodies for the kids it'd be much appreciated. (And, I suppose, that would go for anyone, regardless of their kindie-rocking status.) If interested, drop 'em a line here.
-- I normally wouldn't like this video from L.A.'s Mista Cookie Jar -- it's way too overdone for my own tastes -- but they all combine into something... else. It's probably the tune, which is earwormy, and downloadable for free (or donation) right here...
Mista Cookie Jar - "Joey the Dogg" [YouTube]
Believe It Or Not, Kidz Bop Is Getting More Popular
For those of you who thought that maybe after probably two dozen different releases (including their main series), the allure of Kidz Bop would begin to fade... I have bad news to report. Billboard this week reported that the latest Kidz Bop disk, Kidz Bop 19, hit number 2 on the charts this week. Not the Top Kid Audio chart, but the Big Kahuna, the Billboard 200. It sold... wait for it... 70,000 albums. The #2 rank ties the series' highest chart position (Kidz Bop 9) is its its best sales "week since 2007 (Kidz Bop 12, when it debuted with 71,000 at No. 7.
Billboard reported that Kidz Bop distributor Razor & Tie pointed to a stepped-up TV marketing campaign for the album. Also, exclusives at Target and Walmart helped push the title's mass-merchant (e.g., Target, Walmart) share to about 55%.
Razor & Tie also noted in a separate press release that "sales of KIDZ BOP albums have grown nearly 40% over the past 24 months, while overall music industry sales are down more than 20%."
KIDZ BOP 19 also debuted at #1 on the Billboard Children’s Chart, where there are currently two other KIDZ BOP albums in the Top 10. The new release follows a chart-topping 2010 where KIDZ BOP 18 was the #1 Kids’ Album of the year (KIDZ BOP 17 was #2) and the KIDZ BOP Kids ranked as the #1 Kids’ Artist of the year, according to Billboard.
Other kid audio albums on the Billboard 200 include the Big Time Rush soundtrack (53), Disney Princess: Ultimate Song Collection (124), Kidz Bop 18 (131), Hannah Montana Forever (136), Tangled soundtrack (137), and the Aquabats' Hi-Five Soup! (181). That's 7 albums in the top 200, which isn't a bad result. (Compare that, for example, to the top Classical Album, which debuted at #167 on the Billboard 200, or top World Album, which debuted at #111; neither genre chart had more than one album on the main chart.)
Now, as always, chart position has - at best - poor correlation with listeners' perceptions of quality. (I am partial to the Tangled soundtrack myself.) The strong performance of the mass-marketed Disney/Kidz Bop stuff is a double-edged sword for an independent artist, though. On the down side, trying to break through on the Kid Audio chart against those albums is tough. On the other hand, there's value in having the genre doing so well. Sell a couple thousand albums in a week, and you might only hit #6 or #7 on the Top Kid Audio chart... but you might break through onto the Billboard 200 chart as well. (Sell a couple hundred and you could get on the Top 100 Kid Audio chart.) I realize 2,000 albums in a week is a dream for most artists, but it does seem within range of a handful of artists given a concentrated one-week push.
But 70,000 albums? Yeah, that's not happening.Kindiefest 2011: Brooklyn as Kindie Epicenter
After a wild 2010, Kindiefest is back for another weekend of margaritas, dancing, and heart-to-heart chats.
No, Kindiefest is not a college reunion, though it clearly felt like it at times. (There were even afterparties.)
What it is, of course, is a conference for musicians, writers, producers, and others interested in the family music genre. I've already written a lot about my experiences at the conference the past couple years. And I still go back to the idea of "owning your stuff" that I first wrote about last year.
Registration for Kindiefest 2011 is now open. It's scheduled for April 29 through May 1 once again at Littlefield NYC in Brooklyn. If you're at all local to NYC, then attending the conference shouldn't really even be a question. At less than $100 for the conference (if you register now), it's pretty reasonable price-wise. And while the panels are good, the real value I think is in the opportunity to spend time with other folks doing the same thing you are. All of a sudden, this thing that you have to explain to people about what you do becomes the norm. You move way past that stage and into sharing experiences and advice.
As for those of you who live a distance from NYC, I understand totally, because I'm one of you. You have to add transportation and/or lodging costs to the budget. It's no longer cheap. But for those folks the face-to-face contact is even more important. For example, I had a phone conversation just today with a couple folks I met at Kindiefest. And I think that a lot of out-of-town attendees will say that they made valuable connections with artists and presenters in other cities, connections that helped serve them as they tried to expand their own base of operations. As I have not yet tired of saying, the genre still needs to focus on growing the pie rather than having each artist figure out how to get a bigger share of a smaller pie. Kindiefest is one step towards doing so.
Finally, for those parents/fans who've made it this far, don't worry, tickets for a public Sunday show will be available soon. It was a great value last year and I expect it to be so again this year.What Are You Worth?
Maybe the weather was particularly bad throughout much of the country Saturday, because what started as a humorous Facebook comment from Out With the Kids' Jeff Bogle turned into a full-on thrashing of music award sites, both by Jeff and others in the family music business.
[Note: I've edited this post with some additional comments, noted in italics.]
Now, the weather in Phoenix was lovely on Saturday, and we were tired from hosting a large party the night before, so we spent a lot of time being lazy or being outside. Not, in other words, in front of computer. But I thought I'd add my two cents' worth to the debate.
The first thought I had was, "this isn't new." If you read through the Facebook comments, you'll see more than one person reference always-good-for-a-money-quote Kathy O'Connell, who at the 2009 edition of Kindiefest called programs that give awards out to good CDs, "sticker scams," based on the fact that winning CDs receive (or get to buy) rolls of stickers that the artists can put on their CDs. But unease in the kindie world predates Kathy's two-word distillation. Nearly three years ago, I discussed these types of awards, programs such as the Parents' Choice Awards, who currently charge $250 for an audio entry (not to mention fees for use of the seal and their stickers). I didn't take a strong view one way or another other than to say such awards are useless to folks like myself who've heard just about everything they'd be considering. My purpose in publishing the post was more to solicit opinions from musicians and others on the value of such awards. People willing to respond had a more negative view of the process, but that could be just as much due to people's tendency to complain rather than to comment, "yeah, it seems fine to me." I would also note that even I wasn't the first -- Amy Davis tackled the issue way more than four years ago.
Billboard 2010 Top Kids Albums Announced: Like Another World
I know that people sometimes criticize the Grammys for being not quite attuned to the "real world," especially in the genre categories, but most readers of this site would probably look at this year's list of kids music nominees as being more familiar and representative of the year in family music than the list of Top Kid Audio (as Billboard calls it).
The Top 25 list is headed up by Kidz Bop 18 and followed up by... er... Kidz Bop 17. Kidz Bop gets a total of 4 albums on the list. Disney gets a stunning 15 albums on the list, including 3 Hannah Montana-related disks (one being a karaoke disk). Add a couple Nick/Viacom show soundtracks, the Chipmunks, Charlie Brown Christmas, a Cedarmont Kids album, and a no-name collection of kids' Christmas sing-along songs, and what you're left with in terms of what you might think of as an actual independent artist hitting the charts is, er, nothing.
Now that's not entirely true. One of those Nick/Viacom soundtracks is Music Is Awesome, Vol. 2, the Yo Gabba Gabba! collection, though it could be argued that that's just a college rock album marketed slightly differently. The other album is They Might Be Giants' Here Comes Science album, which has spent a whopping 52 non-consecutive weeks on the Kid Audio chart since its release in September 2009. But it could be argued that TMBG's other fan base helps out considerably as does Disney's distribution power, which no doubt helped get the album in places most kindie artists can only dream of.
Compared to last year, the genre didn't do appreciably better when compared to the industry as a whole, given that 3 of the Top Kid Audio albums charted in the Billboard 200 in both 2010 and 2009. But the broader issue is that it's impossible to fully measure the genre's impact. I wouldn't be surprised if Justin Roberts' Jungle Gym (which reached as high as #10 and spent a couple weeks on the Kid Audio chart is being underreported if a lot of his album as sold via toy stores, for example, or at Justin's shows (I don't know if he's self-reporting to SoundScan). And Laurie Berkner's Best of... must have just missed the cut-off, because her album spent a full 3 months in the Kid Audio Top 10, and has spent 28 weeks there total since being released in late June.
One wonders, however, whether kids' music would have wider visibility in the industry if it figured out some way to better quantify all the albums being sold (or if SoundScan reduced the fee to become a reporter). I would guess that the percentage of "unreported" sales is higher in this genre than in others, and that maybe a few more artists (rather than TV and movie soundtracks) might squeeze their way in were those "unreported" sales finally reported.Taking Kids Music to the Big Boys: 2011 EMP Pop Conference
One of the goals I have for the year is try to expand the reach of family music (at least my sliver of it) into the broader world. I know that everyone is trying to do the same, but I really believe that we can let our freak flags fly a little bit louder, right? As part of that effort, I'm geeked to announced that I've been asked to participate in the country's pre-eminent conference on the study of pop music, the 2011 EMP Pop Conference at UCLA. This year's conference theme is called Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Music and Money, and, as you can probably guess, centers (loosely) on the intersection of the music and cash. The conference is in its tenth year, but this year they've moved it from Seattle (the Experience Music Project's home base) and are hosting it in Los Angeles). And the participants include David Lowery (on derivatives -- the financial kind, really), Holly George-Warren, Ann Powers, Chuck Klostermann, and more. Including me. That's right, I'll be presenting a paper called Pay Me My Money Down: Dan Zanes, They Might Be Giants, and the (Un)Surprising Resurgence of Family Music as part of a panel called "My Music Business," which'll feature a jazz musician, a Cajun-country folklorist, a music journalist, and me. Should be fun. I'm just waiting for my invite to TED.
