Listen To This: "Baby Loves Disco" - Various Artists (King Britt)

Need to take a dance break? Baby Loves Disco rides (sashays? boogies?) to the rescue, streaming the Baby Loves Disco soundtrack for your family's listening (and booty-shaking) pleasure. Curated by DJ King Britt, it's good stuff, featuring some familiar dance floor tunes like "We Are Family" and "Shake Shake Shake" as well as some new stuff. Stream (or purchase) the album below.

Is Kids Music Recession-Proof?

I've been wondering for a while how kids music has been weathering the general financial storms we've been weathering for the past 18 months or so. My general sense is that the industry as a whole is doing OK. I mean, as Mr. Richard joked in an e-mail to me, "Well, the recession hits even the kids music market: you may recall that I performed 400-plus shows in '08; this year I only managed 349..." If that's the case, that sounds like a natural contraction given the economy's overall contraction.

If anything, while a number of artists may be working a little harder to sell albums or to get good paying gigs, I believe the overall size of the kids music pie is increasing.

One entity that definitely felt the effects of the recession, however, is Baby Loves Disco, the source of the far-flung Baby Loves Music empire. Found in around 30 locations as recently as this fall (go here and look at the select-a-city menu at the left), the BLD folks recently announced that they were changing the business model to take the show on the road. That's right -- instead of hosting maybe a half-dozen parties around the country on any given Saturday afternoon -- they're now taking the show on the road. As they explain it:

Back in the day (all the way up through last year!) we used to set up shop in your town (we were in 36 u.s. cities by 2006) and just sort of....stick around. the monthly gigs were great for everyone...except for us, the humble mom and pop disco. soooooo, this year we're trying something new. We'll be touring around like a band, going from town to town in a bus....sort of like the circus. This spring we'll be announcing our road trip 2009 dates but until then, if you really need to get your disco on in the USa we'll be throwing down in NYC twice a month starting in february. [Ed: funky editing and capitalization theirs]

It makes it sound mostly like things needed to get mixed up a bit, which is probably true. The BLD model, which involved local parents hosting the monthly events for what I would guess was not much cash, probably burned out a lot of said parents. (The Phoenix-area BLD went bye-bye a couple years for that exact reason.) But go back to that cached BLD Seattle site and you'll see another explanation:

good people of SEATTLE, the baby loves disco flag flies at half mast as we have to postpone all future disco dates due to these touch [sic]economic times which have cast a long shadow on many of our good friends here.

That quotation could be found on many of the other location sites, which are now wiped out on the relaunched BLD site. I'm not shocked that that forthrightness has disappeared -- I'd want to emphasize the new start, too.

This shouldn't be taken as criticism of BLD and the broad Baby Loves Music empire, which has turned out some really good music and events.

But I'm not surprised that the recession has taken the steam out of a business model that appears in part to have assumed a core group of families would spend $30-$60 a month to take their kids to the disco. Probably not sustainable in the long run, even if the set of families would change over time. The touring model seems to work well (just ask Yo Gabba Gabba!, not to mention a whole host of other shows) -- what might have seemed pricy as a monthly or even quarterly event becomes downright cheap if you do it once a year and view it as an event ("We saw Dan Zanes back in May and we're all going to the King Britt Baby Loves Disco thing next month.")

And if it allows business partners Andy and Heather to get the rest of the Baby Loves Music empire back on track (please get out those Baby Loves Disco, Blues, and Reggae disks, plus new Jazz disks, out pronto), so much the better.

Now what does this mean for the genre in general, the folks who aren't trying to get $17 a ticket (ie., everybody except for literally a half-dozen acts and the occasional overpriced NYC performance)? I'm not positive, but one answer I'd suggest is that musicians should think about designating more of their performances as events. Perhaps not in the sense that going to a big, live-action corporate production is an event, but with special guests and other out-of-the-ordinary occurrences. I'm not saying that playing every Tuesday afternoon at the library or coffeeshop is a bad thing -- artists benefit from that regular contact with their audience. But sometimes a show needs a special kick in the pants to make that $8 or $10 a ticket worth paying to a large crowd.

Maybe even a disco ball.

Review in Brief: The Dino-5 (Baby Loves Hip-Hop Presents...)

Andy Blackman Hurwitz, mastermind of the ever-expanding Baby Loves Music empire, recently released the first CD from his Baby Loves Hip-Hop brand, Baby Loves Hip-Hop Presents The Dino-5. With hip-hop producing legend Prince Paul on board, along with a whole host of well-known names from the hip-hop world telling the story of five hip-hop dinosaurs, the expectations for the project were pretty high.

The end result? Well, it's a mixed bag. To be sure, the music is first-rate. I don't listen to a great deal of hip-hop, but the funky music and beats heard here are right down my alley. "Yea Me Too" has fantastic interplay between MC T-Rex (Chali 2na from Jurassic 5, who is essentially the lead rapper here and does a fine job) and Billy Brontosaurus (Wordsworth), while "Tell Me More" is a funky song with a sinewy melodic line. And "Jump," which features Pos and Dave from De La Soul will, indeed, encourage jumping. The songs, all 9 or 10 here, are lots of fun to listen to.

And if the CD had stopped at that, it would've been an excellent little CD clocking in at just under a half-hour. But interspersed between the songs are a story about how the "Dino-5" came to be. The story itself is OK, your fairly standard "don't judge a book by its cover" story (T-Rex is, shock, a nice guy!). But rather than using poet Ursula Rucker to tell the story in a unique way, creating characters or dramatizing the story in her own words, the recording uses her in the role of a mother reading a story to her child, just setting up the scenes. According to the press materials, the story may be heading for Broadway or a cartoon series; I can see those settings being much better for this source material than the way it's presented here, which is a little boring.

The music will appeal most to kids ages 3 through 6. You can hear tracks and samples here or here or at one of the Dino-5 Myspace pages (like MC T-Rex) -- who knew dinosaurs had myspace pages?

The list of good kids' hip-hop albums is pretty short, and even with the narrative tracks slowing it down, Baby Loves Disco Presents the Dino-5 should make that list, because the music is solid. Here's hoping that it's not the last appearance of the Dino-5 and the next time around, the integration between story and song is a little better.

Baby Does Indeed Love Music

I already talked about the ever-expanding Baby Loves Music empire, but apparently BLM founder Andy Blackman Hurwitz is taking it to heart. In this interview with Wired.com's GeekDad, Hurwitz outlines his future release schedule:

"Hip-Hop comes out April 1 [Ed. - that I've told you about], Salsa September 1 [Ed. - OK, that's been pushed back]. Blues (being produced by the North Mississippi All-Stars) is being recorded in the fall as is Reggae (being produced by Stephen Marley), and both of these should come out in early ’09."

Whoa. That could be seriously good.

While I think Hurwitz sells the rest of the kids music genre short -- he says,

"I hate to be a music snob and like to think that there's some merit to anything creative so I don't want to come across as "dissing" other kids music - it's just that ours is created and produced by the best in the business, musicians with decades of experience in the art of songwriting and songcrafting and I think that's what makes the difference - REAL musicians."

... thereby indeed "dissing" the significant number of talented artists in the genre meeting that criteria right now -- I am impressed by the talent he is bringing to bear to all these different genres.

I'm just waiting for the meta-overload of a "Baby Loves Kids Music" disk.

(Hat tip: Idolator)

Baby Loves Other Types of Music, Too

Is there any stopping the Baby Loves Music empire? Uh, well, probably -- after last night's Grammys, anything can happen -- but I'm increasingly curious as the next two entries in the series show considerable promise.

First up is Baby Loves Hip-Hop features the story of the "Dino-5." The press materials say the CD "follows five best dino friends on a musical adventure as they teach key life lessons and have fun at the same time," which, I gotta tell you, sounds boring as all get-out, but then I read the participants, which include Prince Paul and members of Digable Planets, the Roots, and -- of course -- Jurassic 5. The "Dino-5 Theme Song" you can download at their website sounds much more promising than the PR. In any case, Baby Loves Hip-Hop is out on Baby Loves Music in April.

Next up is Baby Loves Salsa. The skeleton of the website for this CD throws a lot of names around that I, as a non-salsa expert, don't recognize at all. But the tune available for download, "Somos La Banda," is lots of fun. Between this CD and the new Dan Zanes album, it looks like 2008 is the year of Spanish kids' music. Baby Loves Salsa is out on Baby Loves Music in June.