If you spend a lot of time listening to and reviewing music as I do, parts of your living space can quickly get overrun with disks. Now, I've long believed that kids music will be one of the last holdouts against the unstoppable tide of digital music transmission, if only because giving your 3-year-old or the parents-to-be an access code or iTunes gift certificate for a great new CD just seems, well, weird.
But I also understand that as a generation of folks who've always bypassed the physical medium of music consumption enter parenthood, I'm gonna become the exception, not the rule. Of course, getting people to pay for that music is the tough part. There are lots of places where you can download music legally, but I've recently started exploring one site that's got a decent selection of kids music that -- for the moment, anyway -- you can get for free or nearly free.
Amie Street combines the catchphrases "social networking" and "digital music" into a store where members determine the price of music (from primarily independent artists). Most albums and tracks are introduced to the store at a $0 price. As more members buy the digital albums, the price rises to a maximum of 98 cents per track (or roughly $10 for an album). Members who buy albums get the opportunity to recommend tracks off those albums (see, for example, mine), and as the price of those tracks increase, members get additional credit to the their account. (And Amazon is an investor, so clearly somebody thinks it might just succeed.)
So, anyway, I probably lost you at "free or nearly free," so after the jump I'll mention the artists currently available on the site, plus an easy way to pick up a little credit to get you started. Trust me, if you're a longtime reader, you'll find a lot of familiar names on the list...
Kids Music In My Adult World, Part 1: The Workout Mix
I've been mulling over a couple posts on how kids music has infiltrated my "regular" world. To begin, let's take a look at my iPod.
It's an iPod Shuffle, actually, the first generation, with -- OMG! -- a full 1 GB of storage, enough for maybe 300 songs if you like blissful (and short) pop songs for your 5:30 AM jogging or workout pleasure. At the moment iTunes says I have 313 songs on my "Workout" playlist, or about 1.03 GB. In assembling my playlist, I need to be cognizant of the fact that my wife will sometimes use my Shuffle. The upshot of this is that the playlist is devoid of Nirvana (wife: not really a Nirvana fan) and a lot of somewhat harder-edged tunes I might otherwise put on the playlist.
My playlist is, aside from that caveat and the absence of workout-unfriendly string quartets and Miles Davis, fairly representative of my overall collection -- 21 TMBG songs, 12 U2 songs, 11 Spoon tracks, 10 from R.E.M., and so on.
There are also in those 313 songs a total of 31 songs -- almost exactly 10% -- I'd classify as "kids music" (iTunes' categorization isn't the best -- it puts some Elizabeth Mitchell stuff in "Alternative & Punk," which is true, but I think you get my point). Frankly, if I were more assiduous about transferring my kids' music to iTunes, I'd probably have more songs here, but I'm happy with that list. Save for a couple tracks (e.g., Ben Folds on "Red Is Blue"), they're totally upbeat and put a grin on my face.
Which, when you're cruising on that fifth or sixth mile, is a nice bump. The list is after the jump. And feel free to suggest any other workout-friendly kids music tracks in the comments.
What I Did On My Summer Vacation
Marketplace of Ideas... and, er, CDs
As many of you know, for more than a year now my reviews here are also used at the Land of Nod's Music Store, which has a fine selection of music for the kiddoes (in addition to, you know, furniture).
But I'm not monopolistic, so it's in that celebration of the marketplace that I'll point out that the kids music retailer The Pokey Pup (whose owner Bryan Townsend is a longtime -- two-year -- Fids and Kamily judge) is hosting a Summer Contest series of giveaways. Stuff from They Might Be Giants, Gustafer Yellowgold, Recess Monkey, Jellydots, and more. No purchase necessary -- go check it out.
And, lest I forget the Land of Nod, you Father Goose fans will want to check out his recently-released Land of Nod Nodcast Podcast. It's definitely got a much more laid-back vibe than the others in the series, but I think his fans will dig it.
Kids Music That Hasn't Been Written -- Or Covered -- Yet.
I got an e-mail from a kids' music artist asking the following question:
"I'm looking for some song ideas that people like you (you're basically a kidsmusicologist these days) have wanted to hear, but haven't yet heard on a kids' CD. I can always write more songs - but I really like to dig up obscure songs that few people have heard of and lately it seems like I'm having a hard time finding just the right song that hasn't been done by a million kids' artists."
Now, I must have been thrown off by the phrase "kidsmusicologist," because I completely misinterpreted the question. What the artist was looking for was, well, what they were asking for -- "that old song that your grandma used to sing to you that no one has heard for 35 years."
What I answered was something else entirely...
This Is The Way I Write a Post, Write a Post, Write a Post
I don't delve too often into the educational here at Zooglobble, but occasionally I'll get a little bookwormish. I got a note recently from Tracy Zimmerman, who's the public relations director for the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. She's also got a new blog, PRMom, about being a mom and how child development research might affect what she (or other parents) does as a parent.
She pointed in the me direction of a conversation she had with Petra Kern, a music therapist at the Institute, about the importance of music in many developmental ways, including making transitions easier. If you're looking for some theoretical basis for why your kids will clean up better if you actually make a sing-song out of it (or a reminder of it), you can check out the 15-minute conversation. (And if you're wondering about the songbook Kern mentions near the end of the discussion, learn more here.)
