Kindie-Chartin': Kids Place Live's Top 13 Songs of 2012

One of my ongoing interests has been attempting to quantify the popularity of kids music, and I do that every week on my Kindie Week in Review show.  When it comes to kids music albums, the wide variety of charts I consider -- Billboard, iTunes, Amazon, CD Baby -- gives a decent overview.  No chart is perfect, but the variety does give some sense of relative popularity among broad range of audiences, from those who have never heard of the word "kindie" to schools and libraries, to folks like you or me.

When it comes to individual kids music songs, however, the charts do a poorer job.  The iTunes and Amazon singles charts are populated primarily with Kidz Bop renditions, songs from Disney animated movies released 20 years ago, novelty songs, and songs Amazon couldn't figure out where to place.  The only chart that does a decent job of actually charting kids songs, particularly kindie songs, on a national basis, is Sirius-XM's Kids Place Live's "13 Under 13" countdown.  It's a weekly look at the most popular songs on the satellite radio station.  And while the folks at KPL have described the chart as much as art as quantifiable fact, the chart does have a decent relationship to what is actually being played on the station.

I've finally had a chance to compile the data from songs that hit the charts in 2012.  Most of the delay is my fault (I'm already planning the 2013 chart and will be much more timely with that one), but some of the delay is due to the structure of this analysis -- it looks at every song that hit the 13U13 chart in 2012 (there were 50 in all), and sometimes those songs that entered in December 2012 didn't exit until March 2013.  A couple of the songs from the 2011 list of top Kids Place Live songs -- Keller Williams' "Mama Tooted" and Todd McHatton's "I Think I'm a Bunny" -- were charting on the KPL list all the way into June 2012.

This analysis would not be possible without the weekly work of Gwyneth Butera at the Kids Place Live Fans site, so thanks, Gwyneth!

My methodology is pretty simple -- I give each song on each chart points for their ranking, 13 for #1, 12 for #2, and so on down to 1 point for being at #13.  Obviously I could use other methods and weightings, but since the chart itself is not 100% based on plays, I think this is accurate enough.  What it does is make clear which songs were particularly popular.  As it so happens, there was a nice demarcation point between the top 13 songs and the rest of the batch.  So here, then, are the top 13 kids music songs of 2012.

#1: The Board of Education - "Why Is Dad So Mad?": While much of this chart will be presented in clumps of songs because the methodology is crude and it's not worth distinguishing between songs who might have differed by 1 or 2 points in total, it was clear was this Star Wars fandom-related riff by the Seattle band was the most popular kindie song of the year.

#s 2 through 4 (alphabetical):

  • Afro Circus (from Madagascar): "Afro Circus"
  • OzoKidz (aka Ozomatli): "Moose on the Loose"
  • Recess Monkey: "Dancing Bear"

#s 5 through 9 (alphabetical):

  • Randy Kaplan: "Don't Fill Up on Chips"
  • Randy Kaplan: "In a Timeout Now"
  • The Okee Dokee Brothers: "Can You Canoe?"
  • SteveSongs: "Flat Stanley"
  • Wunmi: "Rainbow"

#s 10 through 13 (alphabetical):

  • The Aquabats: "Poppin' a Wheelie"
  • Brave (i.e., from Brave): "Learn Me Right"
  • Lunch Money: "Spicy Kid"
  • Shine and the Moonbeams: "High Five"

Finally, listed alphabetically below are the top10  artists of 2012 on Kids Place Live as judged by total points, which could reflect a single massive hit or a couple good ones.  This is an even more imprecise measure -- some artists spend half their year on the charts with two or even three mid-range hits, not to mention the perennial favorites that get played once or twice a day -- but do provide some additional context.

  • The Board of Education
  • The Brave soundtrack
  • Caspar Babypants
  • Dog on Fleas
  • Randy Kaplan
  • Lunch Money
  • The Madagascar soundtrack
  • The Okee Dokee Brothers
  • OzoKidz (aka Ozomatli)
  • Recess Monkey

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

kpl-img.jpgA 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.