Kindiefest 2012: This Time With Pizza

It's true -- Kindiefest is coming back for the 2012 edition, and the fine folks running the show promise pizza this year. What's that? You can get pizza where you live? Well, how about Dan Zanes, Kathy O'Connell, Mindy Thomas, Jeff Bogle, the ever-elusive Jeff Giles, Darren Critz, Nerissa Nields, to name just a few? Do those folks stop by on Friday night for pizza night? Thought not. And, er, me. Now, it's not easy to get me to fly across the country, but somehow that's what Kindiefest compels me to do every year. After each year's event, no matter how good, I say to myself, "I think I'll probably skip next year's event." And then I find myself taking the train in from JFK and preparing to talk and listen pretty much constantly for the next 48 hours until I get on the train back to JFK. As someone who books shows in Phoenix, it's also an opportunity to see artists who might make a subsequent appearance in these parts. And I pretty much think about the issues raised in Brooklyn the whole year long. I'm looking forward to the panel I'll be part of (details to come), the artists I'll be seeing perform (Caspar Babypants, Renee & Jeremy, Mista Cookie Jar, Moona Luna, and more), and the conversations I'll join in on. It's a great way to see where the field is at right now, and where it's heading. (You can register here.) Don't forget that even if you're not part of the genre as an artist, writer, booker, or otherwise, there's the public showcase on Sunday, which usually features a half-dozen or so artists at a crazy-good price. NYC-area families should definitely consider attending.

Laurie Berkner's New Show: Sing It, Laurie!

The biggest news to come down the pike yesterday was the first public steps toward Laurie Berkner's return to TV. Oh, sure, Jack's Big Music Show is still airing on Nick Jr. But it's been years since new episodes have been made. So it's a big deal that Little Airplane Productions (The Wonder Pets!, Small Potatoes) is partnering with Berkner to create Sing It, Laurie!, a new animated preschool TV series. The series is about a little girl named Laurie who loves to sing and play her purple guitar. In each 11-minute episode, Laurie, along with her dog Jamaica (Jam for short), will explore one theme, such as family, community, or nature. That's Laurie and Jam flying in the Wing Dinger, a "unique one person helicopter that's just the perfect size for Laurie and Jam." Each episode features Berkner's music, some of it newly composed for the show, some of it from Berkner's past albums. The announcement noted that the educational curriculum was written by Dr. Christine Ricci (Dora the Explorer) and will focus on three core themes: creativity, curiosity and music appreciation. What's missing, of course, is the announcement of a TV distribution agreement, so it'll be awhile before we'll see Laurie and Jam figuring out how to solve childhood obesity with a guitar and a helicopter. (OK, we'll probably never see that episode. Which is probably a good thing.) But given both Little Airplane and Berkner's track record, this has a better shot than any other kindie-musician-with-a-script of making it onto a TV channel near you in the next year.

(Kids') Rock Superstars Reunite With Original Singer

Sure, the world's heart is aflutter at the idea of a Hall of Fame band who've been playing for more than 20 years reuniting with their original singer. But it's not Van Halen and David Lee Roth. It's The Wiggles (yes, they were inducted into an Australian Hall of Fame just last year), who announced today that original Yellow Wiggle Greg Page would be returning to the band, with replacement Yellow Wiggle Sam Moran stepping aside. For those of you who are wondering what I'm actually talking about, a little more than 5 years ago Page stepped away from the band due to serious bouts of fainting and lethargy. He was replaced by Moran, who had been a dancer with the band and Page's understudy. And now today, in some bizarro merging of All About Eve and Star Is Born rewritten with a happy ending, Page wants to return, and Moran has agreed to step aside. (The reason appears to be that Page has recovered medically and perhaps is not doing great financially.) But just because all is well within Wiggle-land doesn't mean the rest of the community agrees. Within just three hours of the announcement on the band's Facebook page, over 3,000 people wrote to express their view on the matter. "Sam for Green Wiggle" seemed to be the consensus. Five years ago, I finished off the piece by essentially wishing Page "get well soon," so I'll finish this piece by saying, "welcome back."

Kindie-Chartin': Sirius-XM's Kids Place Live "13 Under 13"

A few weeks back, I attempted to provide some sense of the relative popularity of various family musicians by taking a look at the quasi-objective metric of Facebook fans. The purpose of the review was not to start fights between artists. As I noted in the piece...

1) I know that the number of fans someone has on Facebook has nothing to with quality or talent or anything. Mostly. 2) I'm not trying to start any fights between artists. [See? I wasn't kidding!] 3) As someone who considers how to bring artists in concert to a place that's not New York or DC where concerts happen weekly, the lack of hard data in evaluating an artist's popularity does not help. I can tell you exactly who I would bring in if attendance and cost were no object. But they are.

Nor was I attempting to be exhaustive in my review of artists (as soon as I finished, I came up with another half-dozen artists I could have mentioned). If you're an artist at the level of the folks I mentioned, then perhaps you're doing OK. But Facebook isn't a perfect proxy. (Again, as I noted... "it's a poor proxy for album sales and possibly for concert attendance, and it's a single data source.") So this piece is a second -- and definitely not the last -- way to look at popularity. (Hence my new title for the series - "Kindie-Chartin'.") I decided to look at Sirius-XM's Kids Place Live. The station, likely has the largest audience of any family music radio station, especially since it broadcasts kids music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (It also has nearly 11,000 fans on its own Facebook page.) As such, songs that do well there are songs that have resonated with a large group of kids on a national basis. Clearly, interest on the part of the DJs there have some influence on what does and doesn't get played, but when you're programming as much live music as KPL does, you need to respect what kids do (and don't) respond to. One way to evaluate airplay would be to search playlists, but that would take forever just to get a "point-in-time" view of whatever artists I (or you) feel like searching. Better (and perhaps easier) to look at their weekly "13 Under 13" broadcasts, which count down thirteen of the most popular songs on the station for the past week. Music director and DJ Robbie Schaefer describes the list as a "subjective snapshot of our live shows for that week," reflecting not only programmed spins and listener requests, but also the more nebulous concept of "momentum," which might take into account responses on Facebook and listener e-mails. In other words -- and this is my phrasing, not Schaefer's -- the list is as much art as science. But, it's put together by DJs who are spending many hours a week interacting with their listeners and who get reminded repeatedly when songs do (or don't) get a reaction from their audience.

Charting Kids' Musicians A Little Differently

There was a discussion on the KinDIY Facebook page the other day about the difficulty of quantifying family musicians album sales. It seems like anecdotally everybody has a story or two about how sales and popularity is increasing, but with the prohibitive cost of Soundscan self-registration (i.e., self-reporting sales at concerts, own websites, etc.) for all but the most successful of artists, concrete data is scarce. And I love myself some concrete data. So I'm going to propose a proxy. This is by no means perfect, it's a poor proxy for album sales and possibly for concert attendance, and it's a single data source. But it does, I believe, put artists in context to each other and to the broader music world around them, and has publicly available and most non-manipulatable data. Hello, Facebook. I know, theoretically all but the very oldest fans of the oldest-skewing kindie rockers shouldn't be even on Facebook. But I think that the number of parents who are on Facebook is a reasonable proxy for how many people might be willing to buy a CD for their family or take them to a show. And while Twitter is also popular, I think folks who are popular on Twitter are folks who are on Twitter a lot, which doesn't correlate as well with broad popularity. So what follows is a list of artists, covering the major stars of the genre, along with some less popular artists, all with the number of Facebook fans they have as of today. But before I begin, some context: 1) I know that the number of fans someone has on Facebook has nothing to with quality or talent or anything. Mostly. 2) I'm not trying to start any fights between artists. 3) As someone who considers how to bring artists in concert to a place that's not New York or DC where concerts happen weekly, the lack of hard data in evaluating an artist's popularity does not help. I can tell you exactly who I would bring in if attendance and cost were no object. But they are. So just this simple review was helpful for me...

You Say Kindie, I Say KinDIY, We All Say...

In the wake of Kindiefest, there has been a lot of interest in collaboration, in trying to work together in the kids' music community. Two newly-created entities offer the possibility of both greater information sharing as well as higher visibility. Separated by just a single letter.

The first is the Kindie Music Association, established by Tor Hyams and Kimberly Rowell and first unveiled at Kindiefest. Its purpose is to "promote, support, and recognize family music artists and those individuals directly involved with the kindie community, in an effort to advance the genre and advocate for all its members." Well, when you put it that way, the organization is clearly an attempt to serve as an alternative to the GRAMMY organization, with kids' artists perhaps feeling slighted by the recent decision to merge the two children's GRAMMY awards into one. The structure is similar, with voting members limited to artists, producers, and other creators. Other interested folks (e.g., me) can sign up for Associate membership. At $150 per year for membership, it's not cheap (especially for Associate membership), but the organization may offer some value to artists, depending on what happens with the Kindie Music Awards and product discounts.

The other development sprung out of discussions between Bill Childs and Susie Tennant from Town Hall Seattle at Kindiefest, and it's called KinDIY. Unlike the KMA (which includes the award process), the value of KinDIY will be much more apparent to industry folks than the broad kids music audience. It's a wiki designed to provide information on artists, venues, websites, radio shows, etc. It will allow artists and other folks to provide - and later, find - information that should make it easier for them to find venues to play at, radio shows to play their music, or vice versa. There was always a lot of energy and good vibes coming out of Kindiefest in the past, but this is the first people are leaving the conference with some tangible action occurring as a result. For the moment, it's mostly behind-the-scenes stuff, but it has the potential to have a big impact on the genre.