Best Kids Music 2011: Big Ideas

Nope, we're not done yet with our look at the best in kids music from 2011. For the second year in a row, I'm going to list big ideas from the past year. Not so much albums or songs, but concepts or trends I think will continue to have big impacts.

Inspector Widget: Maybe this is just the blogger/website operator in me, but the biggest trend of 2011 to me was the full flowering of web businesses designed to make it incredibly easy for artists to share their music with the world. Unlike the trainwreck that Myspace was from almost the beginning, these new entities let artists share (and sell) their music with a minimum of fuss and distraction. I'm talking about websites like Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Noisetrade, and Topspin. Now, all of these entities existed prior to 2011, but there was a definite increase in the usage of these entities by the music world in general, and kids music joined right in. Rather than making listeners come to the artist, these embeddable widgets make it easier than ever to meet potential fans where they are -- on Facebook, on Twitter, or on music sites that know a good thing when they hear it. (Ahem.)

Widgets Aren't The Only To Have Your Music Heard: 2011 wasn't just the year of the widget, there were lots of other innovative ways kids musicians got their music out in front of fans both current and potential. One of my favorite (and potentially most important) is from The Bazillions, who have established their own Roku channel to provide instantaneous streaming of their videos to literally millions of households. (Details here.) But iPhone apps, iPad apps, Kickstarter campaigns, and circus collaborations were other ways that kindie musicians tried to reach folks who might not have thought of kids music beyond the big box artists.

Two Heads are Better Than One: Sugar Free Allstars and Secret Agent 23 Skidoo. Little Miss Ann and Suzi Shelton (with an assist from Baze and His Silly Friends' Marc Bazerman). Recess Monkey and Dean Jones (collaborating on the next Recess Monkey album, In Tents. Just a handful of the individual song collaborations between artists whose collaborations might not have occurred just 5 years ago when the scene was a lot more scattered and solitary. Collaboration has always occurred, of course -- folks like Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer and Bill Harley have reached to make music with others for a long time. But connections happen so much faster now that I expect that such collaboration will soon become the rule and not the exception.

Fourteen Heads Are Better Than Two: I mentioned this concept last year in the wake of Kindiependent, the Seattle-area cooperative promoting six local bands. But other areas continue to create their own support groups. Besides AMFM in LA and Let's Play! in San Francisco, which both formed in 2010, the Windy Kindie Chicago Cooperative set up shop this year. And the most active cooperative is probably KindiePDX in Portland, Oregon, which teems with activity, advice, and, well, support.

I would also be remiss if I didn't mention kinDIY, the self-organized wiki-style site (founded by Bill Childs and Susie Tennant, and which I'm an administrator of) designed to help kids' musicians navigate the complex world of kids music.

Ending the Damn "Finally": Jeff Bogle at one point this year suggested a simple piece of action that he thought (and I agree) would go a long way towards increasing the visibility of kids music -- having musicians suggest to their audiences other musicians they might enjoy. In my words, it's up to musicians to end the damn "finally." You know, those "finally"s that say, "Finally, kids music the whole family can enjoy." That statement is a lie, shows ignorance on the part of the speaker, and worst of all, it conveys the idea that the kids music genre is incredibly small when just the opposite is true. Musicians need to convey to their audience the truth, which is that they are part of a long-standing tradition of making music for families that has never been as vibrant as it is today. Some artists have done that in the past, and more are doing it today, but there's room for a lot more. Even if you're not collaborating with anyone else on record or on stage, it's time to share the love more broadly.

Why Listen to Kids Music (An Open Letter to Tom Moon)

Zooglobble: What are your musical memories growing up?
Stefan Shepherd: I remember being in the back seat of the car on weekend drives through northern California hillsides, listening to whatever easy listening station my parents could find. I still have a soft spot in my heart for Herb Alpert and ABBA...

I remember my dad building an electronic organ with multiple keyboards and pedals, the works, when I was in elementary school, maybe first or second grade? I took lessons for maybe 8 or 9 years. I even took piano lessons for a year or two to strengthen my fingers for organ, that's how hardcore we were...

We went through Babies R Us when my wife was pregnant with Miss Mary Mack. I was excited to look through their CD section. I recall it being pretty small. We found a CD -- I can't even remember the title and I doubt we have it anymore -- and I remember being very disappointed when I actually listened to the thing -- the nameless (literally, there were no credits on the thing) people responsible for the music couldn't have been bad musicians, but they produced something so schlocky that we had to find something else to listen to.

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Last week Jeff Bogle from the fine kids music website Out with the Kids participated in a "debate" with the music critic and musician Tom Moon. Heard on WHYY's Radio Times, the hour-long program featured a discussion of whether kids should listen to kids' music or adult music. You can probably guess which side Jeff took, and therefore can also deduce Mr. Moon's position on the question at hand.

I say "debate" in quotation marks, because, as someone quipped on Facebook near the end of the hour, it was like hearing a fundamentalist debate a Unitarian Universalist. Jeff would cede some eminently reasonable point made by Tom ("You're not going to catch me arguing against the Beatles"), while Moon would entirely refuse to grant even a single point Mr. Bogle made worth considering.

Let's put it this way -- it started out by Tom criticizing Lunch Money's gently amusing fable "It Only Takes One Night To Make a Balloon Your Friend" (listen here). As the 20- or 30-second excerpt ended, Moon railed against it as a song teaching kids to make friends with balloons (it's, um, not) and by the end of the show seemed to imply that Mozart would never have composed his many masterpieces had he listened to music like that.

For someone so interested in musical discovery he wrote an entire book about it (1,000 Records To Hear Before You Die -- download the list here) to be so utterly dismissive of an entire subset of music (in response to hearing the Dan Zanes/Sharon Jones cover of "In the Basement," he said that it was nice, but he was pretty sure he'd enjoy anything on her records with the Dap-Kings than on that album -- sound unheard) was a little dispiriting.

At first I chalked it up to the way that debates end up polarizing the argument so that people are more concerned with making points rather than finding some common understanding. But maybe I misunderstood Tom Moon -- maybe he completely believes that, that there is no point to kids' music.

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This past year I've thought some about how to spread the word about great kids' music to the world at large. So I presented at the EMP Pop Conference on adult artists creating second careers in kids music, for example. And I've tossed around some other ideas.

But what if there are lots of people who ask:

"So what? Who. Cares."

It's not an unreasonable question.

We in the kids music world spend so much time talking about what we think to be good kids' music -- mostly to others in the kids' music world -- that we don't take a step back and say why it's important in the first place.

My goal here, then, is to lay out my theory of why kids' music is not only valid but important. I've borrowed a few pieces of information here and there (and I'll note those borrowings accordingly), but the theory (and its faults) are entirely my own.
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Let's begin by defining "kids' music" for the purposes of this discussion. Let's call it music recorded or performed, typically but not exclusively by adults, for an audience that includes (but is not necessarily limited to) children. What does this exclude? Well, that would exclude making music with your kids, an experience that I feel fairly certain Mr. Moon would endorse wholeheartedly. (I do, too.)

Would it exclude the Kidz Bop series? Probably not -- while it's not what I really cover here at the website, it's hard to see how the series -- designed for an audience that includes children -- isn't "kids music" as broadly defined here. The definition also excludes music that was not designed with kids in mind -- I think you can probably think of a handful off the top of your head fairly easily. I would also count as part of this rubric music composed or written for another genre or purpose but for which children are at least part of the audience -- I'm thinking of, for example, music written for TV (Schoolhouse Rock) or movies (The Muppet Movie).

Kids' music, I have come to realize, is not so much a genre as we typically think of musical genres such as hip-hop, jazz, punk, or polka. Because there is, in fact, Secret Agent 23 Skidookids hip-hop, kids jazz, kids punk, and kids' polka. There are more obviously, and your opinions as to relative merits of each performer may differ.

But I tend to think of kids' music more like a category such Christmas music, which draws from many musical genres in its particular focus -- celebrating or singing about the Christmas season (both secular and religious). And, heck, if you're going to talk about Christmas music, you might as well pull back even further and talk about religious music generally -- that's a type of music that's been around for centuries and adapts itself to just about every musical genre there is. Sometimes you even albums like the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas Special, which in addition to being a jazz genre album, also represents music for TV, Christmas music, and, yes, kids music.

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Before I proceed to outline what I see as the benefits of kids' music -- why families should listen to kids music -- let me dispose of some arguments that are non-starters with me.

1) "There is no such thing as good kids' music."

Those of us who've been listening to and/or reviewing kids music for any length of time have long since tired of the phrase "finally, kids music the whole family can enjoy." More often than not, it's thrown out there (the key word being that finally) in support of music that nobody in the whole family will enjoy. But this is an entirely different level of dismissiveness, one that I thought Tom came close to stating. It says, basically, all kids music stinks.

I would certainly say that there's a lot of bad kids' music being made today. I hear quite a bit of it. It can be bad for many different reasons (poor performance, poor production, uninspired lyrics). There's also a fair amount of perfectly competent and unexciting kids' music. And some pretty good recordings to go with a handful of awesome albums every year. There are two points related to this:

1) Those are my opinions based on taste, nothing more, and
2) The same can be said for all music recorded or performed every year.

I've always been upfront in saying that my opinions here regarding the relative merits of different songs and albums are just that, opinions. They are well-informed opinions based on the fact that I doubt there are a dozen people in the world who listen to more (different) kids music every year than I do, but they are opinions just the same and no better than Mr. Moon's.

Whose opinions, by the same token, are no better than mine.

OK, I will grant you that if I'm pulling out the "I've listened to more albums than you" card, then I can't complain when he (or anyone who's been listening critically to music as he has) pulls out that same card on me. But it seems like the marginal value of listening to more albums declines precipitously once you've hit some point in the thousands. Sure, he's probably listened to 10,000 albums or more, and I've only listened to maybe 3,000 or 4,000 -- but how valuable are those extra thousands of albums in determining critical judgment?

And there is no reason to believe that the bell curve of quality associated with kids' music is any different than for music generally, be it recorded or performed live. You want to argue that kids' music is filled with failed adult musicians, I'll argue back that adult music is filled with musicians just starting out whose talent is equivalent to "failed."

Which brings us to point #2.

"This isn't as good as Bach or the Beatles."

Because the history of music made for kids is pretty short (at best, less than a century, arguably only 60 to 70 years, with the renaissance of the kindie or Kids New Wave movement being only 10 to 15 years old), it is not surprising that there aren't tons of canonical recordings. On the Radio Times show, Moon brought out songs, all of which were recorded or written at least 40 years ago (before going back more than 300 years to argue for J.S. Bach), then argued that the tracks Jeff brought to spin weren't as good as what he brought.

Point #1 above regarding the fallibility of individual critical judgments aside, I will stipulate that there is no kids music as good as the best work of the Beatles (the most successful and arguably critically acclaimed pop/rock band in the Western world, if not the world generally) or Johann Sebastian Bach (on the short list of most influential classical composers of the past 500 years)...

If you stipulate that virtually every artist in every genre fails to meet those incredibly high standards as well. Do I think that there have been great kids music albums released in the past decade that I could easily see being loved by my grandchildren and that could be enjoyed by folks without kids? Sure. Is that number pretty darn small? Definitely. But I'm pretty sure most of the other (non-kids-music) albums on my shelf will be mostly forgotten to the world as well.

To put the argument another way, if we say that Michael Jordan (from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a member of the ACC) was the greatest professional basketball player of all time, does that mean that we should automatically assume any pro basketball player who once played in the Big East Conference stinks?

And if we decide to exclude from musical consideration artists who don't compose or perform for the widest possible audience, how do we treat folks such as J.S. Bach, who wrote many of his works specifically to be performed in church? You can argue that his music transcends that audience limitation -- and I would agree -- but that's an argument in praise of his genius, not for the unacceptability of writing for a specific audience.

"Music is different experience that other art forms and therefore... it's different."

I don't think I'm doing justice to this argument which Tom brought out. I think maybe he's trying to argue that kids can process music on their own and so there's no need for kids music because they have all the tools they need to process any piece of music, recorded or live. But I'm not sure. If that's the argument, then I'd argue that they don't have all the tools (see below).

But many other artistic forms of expression are intermediated for kids -- a toddler can sit down and "read" Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by looking at the pictures and maybe recite portions of the book... but only after they've read it a number of times with an adult or older sibling.

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Having disposed of what I believe to be false arguments supposedly outlining why kids' music isn't necessary, what we're left with is making a positive argument for the value of kids' music.

It's always tricky citing Wikipedia, but this discussion on the purpose of art cites French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss as defining the purposes of art as being either "non-motivated" (without a specific external purpose) or "motivated" (based on intentional, conscious actions on the part of the artists or creator).

It's that second set of purposes, the "motivated" ones, that are particularly relevant to the discussion here. On Facebook, Secret Agent 23 Skidoo got straight to the heart of the issue when he said:

"Great music is about encapsulating the emotions and experiences we have into art. Being a kid or having a kid causes unique emotions such as unspoiled innocence, the purity of the love between a parent and child, crippling fear of the dark, how cool kites really are, or the poignant blend of watching your little girl grow up. No matter how brilliant any music is, if it isn't about those things directly, it doesn't strike the same chord it would if it was about exactly that."

Kids have a particular set of experiences that deserve to be responded to. It doesn't matter that it's trivial to you, the adult, because it's very much not trivial to the kid listening.

On my very first NPR chat, I talked about how I think the Beatles are great, but that I didn't necessarily want my daughter to hear nothing but the Beatles' (awesome) love songs. Sure, at the age of 18 months, she's not going to focus on the words, but by the age of 7, she might be able to. And while I can certainly handle that discussion, if I'm listening to a lot of Top 40 radio these days, I'm going to have nothing but those discussions. Really, exactly what is Rihanna singing about that really speaks to my tweenage daughter?

I'm not saying that songs should be a) nothing but happy, and b) totally educational. A number of kids' musicians have tackled songs about important but less cheery topics (Justin Roberts is particularly adept at these), though there probably could be more. And educational kids' music is a subset of music unto itself. Whether or not the majority of the songs are any good is not the point -- the point is that it is perfectly OK if artists dedicate themselves to working those particular songwriting paths. (A side note: it's not easy, and most of it isn't all that good. But that's personal opinion.)

But they have to do it in recognition of a child's differing experiences and language. Peter Himmelman addressed this very specifically in an interview here a couple years ago:

But I think kids are part of the human species. They're not some obsequieous animal. The child is as intelligent as his adult self, but some things are beyond his experience.
It's like, why expect them to enjoy Tom Clancy?
Exactly. It's like writing a record in Peruvian for Americans. It's just not understood. I was doing a songwriting workshop in Boulder this weekend. I assigned them to a kids song, and it was so moving for some folks. A well-written kids song will resonate with adults because they've had that experience. If it's not overly glib it can be very touching.

"Children's" music is primarily music without the innocence stripped out and without it being over-sexualized. Children are getting into s-called pop music too early. Can't we prolong the innocence instead of getting into the p***o culture, be it regarding food or sex? Do we have to start at age 9?Rhythmically, sonically -- perhaps a toddler or a preschooler can respond to the full range of music. But lyrically? No.

Hey, I think the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" or Radiohead's "Karma Police" or Cee Lo Green's "F[orget] You" are great songs, and I'm sure kids the world over dance along. But I would worry about any four-year-old who fully appreciates those songs.

Besides giving an artistic experience that is more relatable to younger kids, another reason in support of kids music that I hadn't fully appreciated until Jeff forcefully articulated it in his radio debate is that of the opportunity of seeing live music. Now, if you're an adult it is not that difficult to find live music specifically performed for an audience just about anywhere in the Western world (and, I would suspect, in much of the non-Western world). It is, however, harder to find that music performed at times and in places that are more appropriate for kids. By setting up performances specifically targeted at kids, you're recognizing that they, too, have value as an audience.

And that's not even getting into the debate about being able to see the artists that they're listening to. Kids can listen to a Justin Roberts disk and, in most places in the country, have a pretty good chance of being able to see him play live for a fairly reasonable ticket price (i.e., little more than the cost of a movie ticket these days). If they love Rihanna, well, it's not clear it's at the right time or price. And when the Beatles reunite for their tour, you just let me know.

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The sad part is that the "kids music vs. adult music" debate is a false one, of course, which I've said from pretty much the very beginning. Of course you should play a wide variety of music, particularly music that you, the parent, enjoy, for your kid(s). I tend to think of it as being like reading -- one of the best ways to encourage your child to read is to let them see you reading for pleasure, being that Samuel Beckett or Tom Clancy. So, yeah, they should see you bopping your head to some classic Motown tunes or cumbia or Jay-Z -- if any of those float your boat. (And, hey, if they don't, maybe you try some out. Mr. Moon has a book that seems like an excellent jumping off point. Seriously.)

But trying to impose your tastes on your kids all the time in hopes that they'll have your "good" taste in music is about as useful as making sure your kids' favorite color is the same as yours -- I'm dubious of the success you'll have and why bother anyway? The purpose of music is to provide pleasure and give people another artistic experience to understand the physical world around them and the emotional world inside them. (If it happens to be the Wiggles that offer them that, so be it. I'll be here to offer some alternatives.)

Really, the only question is why artistic expressions for kids are accepted in almost every other artistic mode besides music. Nobody ever says upon becoming a parent, "They write books for kids?" Art museums have specific interpretive devices to introduce visual arts concepts to kids. TV shows and movies are created just for kids -- some have great artistic value, some have dubious artistic value, but nobody is suggesting for a minute those should cease production immediately just so that all us families can watch Breaking Bad or The Sopranos on DVD with our preschoolers. Nobody questions the idea of making art just for kids except when it comes to music. It seems like the time has come to accept it -- but I think the burden of proof to prove otherwise is on Tom Moon.

I listen to kids music with my family. I think my family's life has been enriched by it and I think my kids are better for it, just as they are enriched by great (and even mediocre) kids' literature and movies. And I think your family will be, too.

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Zooglobble (aka Dad): What are your earliest musical memories?
Miss Mary Mack: I think the first grade musical, and playing on the piano before I took lessons.

How about music or CDs?
Yeah, like that from the bands you brought to the children's museum.

How about you?
Little Boy Blue: My Flood CD and the other CDs you made for me [goes back to play his Birthday Party mix].

Kindiefest 2011: The Big Picture

I'm writing this (or at least starting to write) while at about 38,000 feet, heading home to Phoenix after another weekend of family music immersion at Kindiefest, the annual gathering of family musicians, radio folks, writers, and others. I spent a fair amount of time this weekend trying to think about if there was an overarching theme to this year's conference. What is the big picture? Last year, if you'll remember, it was about owning your [stuff], the year before it was about... well, a bunch of stuff.

And this year? There were always the random phrases people uttered during the weekend. In the entertaining discussion on using social media, Ashley Albert from the Jimmies mentioned how one children's media property allowed users to create avatars of themselves as potatoes, and I immediately wrote "potato avatar" as the name of a kids album or kids band, I'm not sure which. Daron Henry mentioned how Recess Monkey had at some point become a "jobby," a combination of job and hobby that captures, I think, the weird position of some kids music artists, for which this artistic endeavor has become something considerably more than a hobby, but maybe hasn't quite reached the point of full-time work. Yet.

Kindiefest co-founder Bill Childs tagged "authenticity" as the word for the weekend. I won't deny that that notion surfaced throughout the weekend, especially in the musical performances. (More on those tomorrow.)

But I'm going to call the word of Kindiefest 2011 "community." It wasn't a buzzword that rolled off everyone's lips immediately -- well, except maybe in my panel -- and it's not the word itself that I'm choosing. It was some that happened constantly. At least four or five times during the conference, somebody said to me (or I thought to myself), "I want to -- or I've been told that I need to -- meet [someone else]." And then I'd take it upon myself to find that person, and drag them (and you think I'm exaggerating, but it's not too far from the truth) to that other person.

That community could be found in the many after-parties post-conference events, where some folks did the small-level relationship building that long-term associations are built upon. Sometimes that involved serious discussions on how band finances really work or trading touring war stories or fond memories, and sometimes that involved making really bad (and/or off-color) jokes.

And probably most significantly, community was found in the showcases and public festival, where again this year many musicians were the most enthusiastic listeners. It was heartening to see the large contingent of kindie musicians on one side of the stage singing or clapping along loudly, for example, during Elizabeth Mitchell's set. Or when during the showcase from Shine and the Moonbeams -- and, goodness, you will be hearing much more about them -- the little boy on stage got a little stage fright and didn't want to dance, Tim Kubart and Ann Torralba got up and danced away. That's not even mentioning all the different folks who sat in on others' sets.
There were a lot of familiar faces at this year's event, but there were also new faces. The challenge to the long timers (and it feels weird to call those of us attending for 2 or 3 years to be long timers, but there it is) is to keep the inclusionary feel of the genre open, but it's also the challenge for the newcomers, too. There's a difference between community-building and networking -- it's the former that will get us to Kindiefest 2021.

My relationship to this community that's being created (or significantly expanded) is a little odd in that I am both a part of and yet separate from the community's largest contingent, that of the musicians. I believe firmly in the idea of making music for and with kids and families, but a significant component of my work here is to provide (my own subjective) qualitative distinctions. As a result, I still walk that fine line between encouraging everyone (because who knows who will become the next [name your favorite artist]) and recognizing (repeatedly) the artists I think best reflect the explosion of creativity we're seeing and hearing right now. It seems a little competitive for a collaborative community, but one of my hopes is that events like this help motivate everyone to try harder, dig deeper, and take artistic chances. (And that includes me. That even includes readers who have nothing to do with the music-making end of the community and just want to find more great music for their families.) In the end, that's one of the things that will make this community more visible to the community at large.

Thanks again to Stephanie, Mona, Tor, and Bill for putting on another excellent conference, the best Kindiefest yet. Learned some, and laughed and got inspired a bunch. That's a lot for 48 hours in the city.

With Messianic Fervor

I would make for a lousy missionary.

Talking to people one at a time, trying to convince them right then and there in the correctness of my position is not my strength -- proselytizing makes me blanch. I would rather spend time day after day, week after week, year after year, offering facts and sharing opinions, not to mention listening to others. If others come to my point of view, great. If not, it's not worth ramming my head into a wall repeatedly. And maybe I'll have my own mind changed.

My approach to kids music has been pretty much the same. I'm happy writing my opinions on my website and argue them with some vigor, but get me one-on-one with somebody about kids music, and I'm, like, "Uh, I kinda like Elizabeth Mitchell."

I know.

I should be a little more forceful (and, OK, that quote above's an exaggeration) but it's not an exaggeration to say that the person who talks most about Zooglobble locally isn't me -- it's one of my friends who's constantly asking for my business cards and giving them to people she meets.

So it was with some amusement that I read an article about Rani Arbo and her career with her band Daisy Mayhem. Her career navigates both the folk and kids music camps...

Rani Arbo is one of Middletown's biggest exports — hell, it wouldn't be a stretch to call her one of Connecticut's, considering her band's rigorous touring across the nation. She and Daisy Mayhem have the rare luxury of fitting into two niche markets, whereas most bands are lucky to fit into one. Since they use acoustic instruments (including drummer Scott Kessel's all-recycled kit — he uses cat food tins and a suitcase for a kick drum), they fit in handsomely with the folk, bluegrass and roots music circuit. And their versatility with both adult and children's songbooks allows them to tap into the kids' music fanbase, who Arbo (vocals/violin) describes as “messianic about things they like.”

Uh-oh - she's got us.
One of the continued challenges we as fans of high-quality family music face is convincing others that it exists. As I've often said, nobody ever becomes a parent and finds themselves saying, "You mean, they write books just for kids?" Yet that's exactly what I hear over and over, and I have plenty of e-mails from people thanking me to opening their family's ears to new sounds. I'm not the only one -- I know that others get those same types of comments, be it in person or by e-mail. So that's why we write so much about this stuff -- we are trying to change your life. I plead guilty to it in the case of Arbo and many, many others.

Music blogs and websites targeted at adults aren't trying to change your life. Well, maybe they are, but only by shifting tastes from one set of artists to another set of artists. With family music, kindie rock, the Kids New Wave, whatever you want to call it, we're trying to open horizons, trying to help you envision new possibilities. It's proselytizing via mp3s and YouTube.

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I get asked not infrequently, "What makes good kids music?" It seems a perfectly reasonable question, but it's one I've never been able to find a good, 15-second answer for. (Perhaps that's why I've not yet appeared on the Today Show to talk about the genre.) Sometimes I take more of a technical approach ("the vocals are mixed louder"), sometimes a more philosophical approach ("the subjects are relatable to an [X]-year-old"), but I've never quite found the right answer. (See? If I were a good missionary, I would.)

I've come to think, however, that it's not a reasonable question, that I can no more tell you what makes good kids music than I can tell you what makes good music, period. Can you answer that question? It's totally subjective. Why shouldn't the old American Bandstand criterion apply?

"It's got a good beat, and you can dance to it."

Or maybe this (mangled) judicial quotation:

"I don't know how to define it except that I know it when I see it."

Those seem as reasonable a response as any to the question, because the only difference, really, is the audience in question. Someone listens to polka (or reggae or electronica) and may have an entirely different reason for doing so than the person who listens to metal (or rap or country), and only after you answer the question of why someone is listening can you offer an opinion as to which is better or worse.

But trying to get someone to realize that the music may be different but the goal (and therefore the standards) is the same, that's hard. If you think the standards are different, you might think the music itself is different. And even if the standards are the same, trying to convince someone that there are more options available is a hard row to hoe.

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This all brings us back to yesterday's announcement of changes to the Grammy categories, including the merging of the two current award categories into one. There was much chatter yesterday about the changes, whether they were good or bad, what the impact might be, etc. etc. I think the reason it did engender so much chatter is the result of the two issues I've discussed above, that of the genre's low visibility and perceptions of quality. For all its many faults (some of which the Academy probably feels like it's trying to address with these changes), the Grammys are still the single biggest set of musical awards in the United States. Winning an Grammy, even being nominated for one, is a big deal and results in a lot of attention. So when the number of eligible nominees gets cut in half, many artists will perceive, not unreasonably, that their potential Grammy-nominated visibility has just declined. And why shouldn't they be worried that the range of music available to reach Grammy ears will also decline?

It seems to me that the choice that the entire family music community -- musicians, writers, listeners -- has is this: we either are willing to accept being a marginalized musical outpost or we make noise to celebrate this in the broader community. I said it once before, and I'm saying it louder this time: the visibility of family music needs to be raised in more settings. I'm not suggesting that musicians change what music they make -- I think there's room for many more voices and diversity is an ally. I know many people have worked long hours to reach the level of visibility we have today, but we're not there yet.

I have more projects I'm working on to make more people aware that, yeah, they make music for kids. I hope to share news of some of those in the not too distant future.

At which point, it'll be time to polish my shoes and start knocking on doors. I hope some of you will, too.

What Are You Worth?

Maybe the weather was particularly bad throughout much of the country Saturday, because what started as a humorous Facebook comment from Out With the Kids' Jeff Bogle turned into a full-on thrashing of music award sites, both by Jeff and others in the family music business.

[Note: I've edited this post with some additional comments, noted in italics.]

Now, the weather in Phoenix was lovely on Saturday, and we were tired from hosting a large party the night before, so we spent a lot of time being lazy or being outside. Not, in other words, in front of computer. But I thought I'd add my two cents' worth to the debate.

The first thought I had was, "this isn't new." If you read through the Facebook comments, you'll see more than one person reference always-good-for-a-money-quote Kathy O'Connell, who at the 2009 edition of Kindiefest called programs that give awards out to good CDs, "sticker scams," based on the fact that winning CDs receive (or get to buy) rolls of stickers that the artists can put on their CDs. But unease in the kindie world predates Kathy's two-word distillation. Nearly three years ago, I discussed these types of awards, programs such as the Parents' Choice Awards, who currently charge $250 for an audio entry (not to mention fees for use of the seal and their stickers). I didn't take a strong view one way or another other than to say such awards are useless to folks like myself who've heard just about everything they'd be considering. My purpose in publishing the post was more to solicit opinions from musicians and others on the value of such awards. People willing to respond had a more negative view of the process, but that could be just as much due to people's tendency to complain rather than to comment, "yeah, it seems fine to me." I would also note that even I wasn't the first -- Amy Davis tackled the issue way more than four years ago.
But beyond that, if you're an artist, what do you do? Well, I'm not an artist, but I might suggest some math.

Hey, wait -- where's everyone going?

Seriously, allow me to explain.

Awards such as these should basically be considered as part of an artist's overall promotional push and therefore should be evaluated as whether or not the cost of the potential additional notoriety is less than the potential benefit.

Let me subject myself to the analysis. As you probably know, I occasionally review kids music for NPR's All Things Considered (which I'm still totally geeked about). For sake of argument that I review 2 albums a year on air. Also for the sake of argument that I get about 200 albums each for which the artists harbor some small dream that I might pick their album to review on the air. (I get more than that, but some just aren't thinking about NPR.) So that means, all else being equal, an album sent to me has a 1% chance of being reviewed on NPR.

I know, I know, all else isn't equal, and though I try my best to be fair, you (the artist) might feel I'm not going to give your album a proper shake. Or maybe you think I'm particularly predisposed to like you. Whatever -- the key takeaway here regardless of who you're submitting to is that you have to know your audience and adjust the percentage accordingly. Feel free to say that I'm being overly generous to my sense of fairness and that your percentage is too high.

Or maybe it's too low. Again, you have to know your audience, just like I have to know mine. I like to think I'm fairly broad in my coverage of subgenres and artists, but I can't be too broad. I have to provide some editorial focus. That focus is different from other sites. Your job as a reader is too find the sites which either: a) cater to your musical interest, or b) cater to your reading/viewing interest, making you interested in stuff you might not be otherwise. (There are a ton of articles in "The New Yorker" that I would never read if the subjects were covered in a different magazine.)

Your job as an artist... well, as the saying goes, on the internet, all you have is your word. (Well, the saying also goes, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but I'm digressing into "The New Yorker" again.) Which is to say, getting a review on a site that reviews pretty much anything and everything favorably is pretty much worthless. Your trick is to find a curated site that most closely aligns with your music.

What does that 1% chance of a review at any site cost you? Well, for me, it costs you, let's say, $3, which covers the cost of reproducing a physical album and the cost of mailing it to me. (Free mp3s sent across the internet make this equation impossible, and are also generally prohibited by these awards organizations.) Again, your cost may be higher or lower.

And what does that 1% potentially get you? Well, I have no hard data on the number of albums sold post-NPR piece, but I think that 500 albums is probably a good ballpark figure. Assuming that you're netting $10 per album (another figure you're welcome to change), then that's a 1% shot at $5,000.

Bringing it home then, for $3, you have a 1% shot at $5,000. If you do that math ($3 gets you $50), it's pretty good, I think. Now, it's a lottery (sort of), and so those benefits are distributed unequally -- meaning, 2 artists will get $5,000 and the rest get nothing. But the equation is same for every system. You could do the equation for a review on this very website (or any other website or magazine, or radio station, for that matter). You have a higher likelihood of getting a review on this site than on NPR, but I'm pretty sure that a glowing review on this website doesn't immediately translate into an additional 500 albums sold.

How does that compare to Parents' Choice? Well, I don't what goes into parts of their equation. But if you're willing to make some assumptions, you just need to solve for this equation:

Cost of entry <= Percent likelihood of award * Increased sales from award * Amount of sale returned to artist

If you look at the site Jeff refers to (which will go unnamed here and which, when I was first tipped off to it more than a couple months ago, I decided to ignore entirely and hadn't visited since), you can also do this equation.

Cost of entry = $78 ($75 + $3 for mailing CD) vs. 33% chance of award (some of you may feel I'm being generous) and increased sales of... what?

Well, you can flip the equation a little bit -- if $78 gets you a 33% chance of winning, then you can also solve for x as follows:

$78 / 33% = x / 1%... x = $2.60

So, $2.60 buys you a 1% chance of an award from that site. $2.60 is about 87% of $3.00, so if you think winning an award there will generate you $4,333 of additional sales, then that site's a better deal than sending your disk to me. Even if you assume that paying your fee will guarantee a review, it had better generate $1,300 of additional sales to be a better deal than sending it to me and taking your 1% NPR chance.

OK, for those of you who checked out during the math discussion, you can come back now. One of the purposes of creating the Fids and Kamily Awards was to honor good family music in a way that didn't require the artists to pay a fee. So while I don't know how much impact doing well in F&K has, it's a no-cost opportunity. (I'd also suggest that albums that doing well in F&K are doing well elsewhere -- after all, Justin Roberts not only placed first in this year's award, he was also nominated for a Grammy.)

I suspect that PR folks would believe that submitting albums for review and award submissions is part of a portfolio for artists and their music. Nobody cares about one review, but get fourteen good ones, and then folks might start paying attention. (That's sort of the philosophy behind F&K, for what it's worth.) It's the portfolio of positive press that gets people's attention, not the single review. I mean, I assure you that reviewers "in the industry" don't care one bit that I or Jeff or Bill or Amberly reviewed or played your album when they get your PR materials. I suppose that others who don't necessarily follow this genre on a daily basis are more impressed by a series of pull-quotes. But it's that series of quotes, not the individual reviews, that matter.

But you, artists, need to think wisely about what you're worth, and where you want to put your time, talent, and treasure, to use a phrase from another setting. You've spent a lot of time putting music to paper, and then to disk. Where do you hustle to get people to listen to that music, to buy that music? Time sending music to me (or whomever) is time you could be doing something else with your musical efforts -- playing live? Writing songs? Practicing? And only you can decide how to balance all those different parts of your musical life.

To put it another way -- could you spend that $250 entry fee in another way that, in the long run, makes a bigger impact on sales? Could you spend it on, say, an hour of recording time with a couple extra string players or horn players? Would that $3 CD sent to a random reviewer be better served given to someone locally, like maybe the booker at the local indie rock club or the local children's media librarian? Or would you get more value from that $75 entry fee by putting it toward Kindiefest registration. (Let me answer that last one -- most definitely you'd get more value from the Kindiefest registration.)

There is no right answer to those questions, and they'll be different for every artist. I have no doubt that many artists think about these decisions every week. But I think it's important that artists really consider how they're going to make their music as good as it can be, and then how they're going to get that music heard. And the only way to do that is to make explicit these choices and the returns they're going to get from each decision.

As for me, I've had a couple ideas in the back of my mind for awhile that would address the information asymmetry the general public has regarding kids music (and which leads to people thinking that they need awards programs to guide their selections). Perhaps this will spur me to get those balls rolling. And those balls are now starting to roll.