(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.
Beyond the chart itself, Gwyneth Butera runs the Kids Place Live Fans website, which includes listings of most "13 Under 13" shows and ratings. (Yay for historical data!)

I've gone back and looked at approaching 2 years' worth of "13 Under 13" data to compile a listing of 2010's most popular songs on Kids Place Live. The listing was pretty simple -- if a song was #1 on the chart, I gave it 13 points; #2, 12 points; and so on. The more total points a song had, the more popular it was.

Now, as always, some caveats:

1) Again, I'm not trying to pick any fights.
2) Getting played on Kids Place Live isn't necessarily a reflection on an artist's worth. Songs don't get played on Kids Place Live (or any radio station) for a wide variety of reasons. For example, most of their programs target the, say, 4-to-9-year-old age range.
3) As noted above, the "13 Under 13" lists are as much art as science and doesn't wholly reflect actual airplay. I'm sure Heywood Banks is driving a very nice car as a result of the regular airplay of his song "Toast" on KPL even though his song doesn't make the weekly list. And raise your hand if you think the Hampsterdance needs to be played one more time each week. (I thought so.)
4) Gwyneth is an intrepid traveler and only had maybe 85% of the charts. To make comparing easier, I guessed placements for the missing weeks. These charts tend to be fairly slow-moving -- typically only one song enters and leaves the chart each week -- so I'm probably only off by one or two chart positions for any missing week. But it's a reason why I'm only presenting the Top Five and Top Ten songs for 2010 and not ranking within those.

OK, you've read long enough. Here, in alphabetical order, are the top five songs on Kids Place Live for 2010 (songs that first made an appearance on the charts in 2010):

Kristin Andreassen - "Crayola Doesn't Make a Color for Your Eyes"
Jonathan Coulton - "Princess Who Saved Herself"
Joe McDermott - "Clap Your Hands"
Justin Roberts - "Sleepoverland"
Tim and the Space Cadets - "Superhero"

These five songs were pretty clearly head and shoulders above the rest in terms of their point totals. The next five?

The Verve Pipe - "We Had to Go Home"
Elizabeth Mitchell - "Shoo Lie Loo"
Brady Rymer - "Love Me for Who I Am"
Keith Munslow - "Watchin' All the Cars Go By"
Recess Monkey - "Jet Pack"

There were a total of 50 songs that charted. (Remember, it's typically only one new song each week.) Now, if you go by artist rather than just song, you get a slightly different list. Here's the top ten "13 Under 13" artists for 2010 (again, based on songs that first chart in 2010).

Caspar Babypants
Dean Jones/Dog on Fleas
Joe McDermott
Jonathan Coulton
Justin Roberts
Keith Munslow
Kristin Andreassen
Rani Arbo & daisy mayhem
Recess Monkey
Tim and the Space Cadets

This list features some folks like Caspar Babypants and Rani Arbo who had multiple songs chart on the list but didn't necessarily have one super-popular song. Having multiple songs in a year doesn't typically happen, due in part to the relatively slow pace of chart movement. (Other artists, like the Verve Pipe, have multiple songs hitting the charts, but over multiple years.) Alternately, you could look at albums -- Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti had not one, not two, but three songs hit the charts (the JoCo track, along with Emily Curtis' "We Belong" and Grenadilla's "Arabella Angelique"). [Plus, as Gwyneth subsequently noted to me, a fourth song, "Little by Little," entered the charts in 2011.]

One final comment: Having looked at charts through June of this year, that Jonathan Coulton track may prove to be one of the most popular Kids Place Live tracks ever -- it's hit the top of the charts for a second time. Everybody responded so enthusiastically to the song from the get-go, and it's clear that it's incredibly popular with listeners of all ages.

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...
-- Lady Gaga: 34,197,423 fans
-- Muse: 9,953,421
-- Kanye West: 6,788,280
-- Carrie Underwood: 4,961,883

(Wow, really? 34 million fans? Wow.)

Now perhaps it's not entirely fair to compare four of the biggest English-language music stars to folks in this genre, so here are some fan page totals for some randomly chosen folks on the undercard of the Austin City Limits Festival 2011 lineup:

-- Miniature Tigers: 7,729
-- The Moondoggies: 3,610
-- Chancellor Warhol: 530

Those are a little more representative of what we're looking at than Lady Gaga. So let's plunge into the kindie world and see how they compare...

Superstars
-- They Might Be Giants: 180,161 -- not entirely fair perhaps because they have a whole 30-year career of which the kids' stuff is only part of ten years of that. But considering that they have more fans than, say, Broken Social Scene or Elbow, and almost as many as TV on the Radio, folks who are going to get really nice late-afternoon or evening-time slots at ACL, I've often wondered why they don't play more festivals.
-- Imagination Movers: 46,925 -- the power of TV, folks. It's why a whole bunch of family musicians have a pilot treatment in their back pocket (or the back of their mind). [But as a point of comparison, Yo Gabba Gabba! has more than 335,000 fans.]
-- The Laurie Berkner Band: 24,866 -- that's a huge number, considering that Berkner's time on TV is considerably less than it used to be.
-- Justin Roberts: 4,052 -- this is a number that's interesting to me, because it makes me think that there are some artists like Roberts who could legitimately play a music festival and not be assigned to a "kids'" stage and would actually draw a decent crowd.
-- Dan Zanes: 3,184 -- This is an example of where the Facebook methodology breaks down a bit. I think Dan's gone back and forth as to usage of his FB page, so I think this is pretty low compared to his "real" popularity. He has close to 1,900 actual friends for his personal Facebook page, so it seems like his fan number should be a lot higher.
-- Ralph's World: 1,619 -- Another case where I feel like the Facebook methodology fails a bit in this case.

Stars: What's interesting is how some of this data challenges my assumptions of who's a "superstar" and who's a "star." (I know, whether or not such distinctions matter is another question entirely.)
-- The Fresh Beat Band: 12,694 -- not entirely fair as they do virtually no touring
-- The Verve Pipe: 5,877 -- Not fair as I think they have a decent-sized schism between their "adult" fans and fans of their family stuff. But that's a lot of folks to be automatically interested in a project.
-- Choo-Choo Soul: 3,005 -- again, the power of TV (though they're clearly not as visible as the Movers).
-- Keller Williams: 2,860 -- this is just his KIDS page; his regular page has more than 28,000 fans.
-- Caspar Babypants: 2,602
-- Quinn Sullivan: 2,494 -- remember when I said I thought Sullivan's set might be the most crowded of the Austin Kiddie Limits stage in 2011? That's why.
-- Sara Hickman: 2,042 -- note: she has nearly 5,000 friends on Facebook, so this number's probably a bit low.
-- Elizabeth Mitchell: 1,839
-- Milkshake: 1,813
-- Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer: 1,723
-- Bill Harley: 1,722 -- dig how these two veterans are right next to each other on this list.
-- Rocknoceros: 1,545
-- Sugar Free Allstars: 1,535
-- Secret Agent 23 Skidoo: 1,519 -- I love how the two cooperators are right next to each other on this list
-- Brady Rymer: 1,501
-- Recess Monkey: 1,392
-- Lunch Money: 1,351
-- Rhythm Child: 1,214
-- Jim Cosgrove: 1,192
-- The Not-Its: 809

I could keep going, but I think you get the idea. If you're an artist, you probably also see where you need to get your fanbase to in order to have a viable national presence, if that's what you desire. And obviously if you're a promoter, if 95% of that artist's fans live a thousand miles away from your venue, well, then that's not necessarily a guarantee of good attendance.

And if you're a fan of one of these artists and you're on Facebook and you haven't "Like"d them, then you probably should...

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.

The Ketchup Report, Vol. 6

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]