EDIT: Haven't forgotten about Skye Friday. Special treat if you read the full article! (No scrolling ahead, cheaters.)
I've decided to post my Radio Disney article for
Buzzsaw Haircut here because we've been having a few snags updating online content. Readers in the Ithaca area should pick up a copy later today and tomorrow...the cover is particularly excellent. Guess which cover blurb I insisted upon (mentions of Skye Sweetnam in Ithaca-based publications since April 2005: ~14).
ALL EARS AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Tracking Radio Disney in Its Troublesome Tweens
In March 2000, Metal Mike Saunders—co-founder of the punk band Angry Samoans and Village Voice contributor—wrote an article called “All Ears,” which explored an up-and-coming youth phenomenon: Radio Disney.
The article describes the then four-year-old Disney AM radio station as a kid-dictated pop utopia, a “freeform” radio format in which classic bubblegum and early teen pop mingle indiscriminately. In this bizarre pop universe, acts like one-time ABBA cover band A*Teens and Backstreet Boy younger sibling Aaron Carter could go platinum without ever getting Top 40 radio airplay. Teen pop heavyweights like Britney Spears, *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys dominated Radio Disney’s own charts, the daily Top 3 and weekly Top 30, while unknown or manufactured novelty acts achieved sustained popularity for months and years at a time.
When the station launched in 1996, programmers scrambled to find content that suited an audience of children age two to 12. In Radio Disney’s earliest days, novelty and bubblegum acts like the Archies, the Trashmen and 1910 Frutigum Company shared the spotlight with dorky Danish Europop duo Toy-Box, the Vengaboys and any number of cartoon theme songs. The format was determined by content-controlling program directors and child audience members themselves, who voted songs on or off the air through a 1-800 call-in process and then voted again to decide the Top 30 songs of the week.
On Radio Disney’s tenth anniversary, it is clear that the station has changed. The social influence and market power of children and tweens, a flexible age bracket for preadolescents, is more evident today than ever before. Saunders depicted a parallel universe in which grade schoolers might herald the return of bubblegum music into a post-grunge “mope-rock” radio environment. His “pop underground” has long since moved aboveground, and Disney has guided the transformation nearly every step of the way.
The most significant factor that has altered and perhaps undermined the “freeform” Radio Disney of 2000 is corporate ownership of the teen pop genre. Six years ago, Disney itself had little control of the music played on its radio station outside of film soundtracks. But through its various record labels, Disney now owns, produces and distributes a formidable share of tween-geared pop, which it then disseminates on the airwaves. Radio Disney’s Top 30 is consistently filled with artists originating from Hollywood Records, a Disney-owned label under the Buena Vista umbrella, as well as by acts originating from the Disney Channel television and film universe. The cast of the Disney made-for-TV movie
High School Musical recently broke Billboard records by making the biggest one-week jump on the singles chart in history. Paul, John, George, Ringo, meet Troy, Gabriella, Ryan, Sharpay.
In the last few years, Disney has positioned itself as one of the world’s leading teen pop producers, reaching larger young audiences. Radio Disney is available in eight countries outside the United States and has an audience of 3.2 million children and “2.4 million moms.” Apparently, dads weren’t included in Disney’s most recent census figures. Radio Disney has a clothing and toy line, and it has “leveraged” this market power with McDonald’s, Toys “R” Us, and Kohl’s.
I spoke to Saunders via e-mail to get his take on the evolution of the station.
“The original mix that included oldies and [Disney] soundtrack/movie cuts were needed originally to fill out the playlist to whatever large head count the programming director and execs had decided upon,” he explained. “As more and more songs from Backstreet/Britney [era] came into play, the ‘add on’ tunes got bumped. Simple as that.”
Today, in order to add new songs onto the station, Radio Disney’s audience votes on an individual song introduced to the weekly Music Mailbag feature. The song in question is then voted up or down (“picked” or “kicked,” as they say) through a toll-free telephone number and online voting. If a majority of voters like the song, it is “picked” and enters the rotation, where it will battle other songs in another phone-in process that determines the Top 30. If the song is “kicked,” it will, ostensibly, never be heard again.
This seemingly egalitarian voting system has led to many unlikely novelty success stories, including Hampton the Hamster’s “Hampsterdance,” which has been in the Top 30 for six years, Mr. C the Slide Man’s “Cha Cha Slide” and, most recently, Crazy Frog’s “Axel F,” which is poised to remain in the Top 30 for months to come.
Other success stories are direct results of Disney cross-platforming. The most consistent success of the last few years is Hilary Duff, formerly the star of Disney Channel’s “Lizzie McGuire,” who has an astounding 20 songs in rotation—by far the most of any artist played on the station.
Aly and AJ, a sister duo whose Hollywood Records debut
Into the Rush was released in August 2005, have 11 songs in rotation. Alyson Michalka, one half of Aly and AJ, has a leading role in the Disney series “Phil of the Future.”
These artists, along with ex-Dream Street solo artist Jesse McCartney and Disney Channel’s “That’s So Raven” star Raven-Symone, come from Hollywood Records. Even Christian pop group Jump5, who are distributed through the Christian rock label Sparrow, have a major corporate link to Hollywood. Sparrow is a subsidiary of EMI Christian Group, Hollywood Records’ direct distribution pathway to the Christian market.
One burgeoning Disney teen pop success story is Miley Cyrus, the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus and star of the new Disney Channel series “Hannah Montana,” in which she plays a girl who attends middle school by day and doubles as a teen pop star at night. Her first single as “Hannah Montana” hit number 19 on the Top 30 in her first week eligible without being voted into rotation. Meanwhile, Miley Cyrus recently signed a record deal with Hollywood.
To what extent these corporate connections suggest a monopolistic conspiracy is admittedly questionable. Saunders was skeptical of direct vote-tampering, noting that many Top 40 artists who have worked closely with Disney on television and soundtrack projects, including perennial Disney compilation contributor Skye Sweetnam, don’t do particularly well on Radio Disney, but rather perform about as well as they do on the contemporary hit radio charts.
“The greatest thing about Radio Disney,” Saunders adds, “[is that] no one took payola to put lousy J-LO singles onto the air.”
Aside from streamlined corporate control of production, there are other reasons that lyrics-conscious Radio Disney might favor promoting star crossovers from the world of wholesome Disney television series and explicitly Christian artists. Content control has always been a major component of the station’s programming choices. Radio Disney frequently edits lyrical content its programming directors deem questionable. The line “I’m not that innocent” was infamously cut from Britney Spears’s “…Oops! I Did It Again,” and more recently Weezer’s “Beverly Hills” was edited to excise the words “crap” and “screwy.”
But teen pop has changed since the innocent early ‘00s era of “not that innocent.” Dark, earnest, and confessional acoustic, pop-punk and nü-metal rock constitute the new sound of today’s tweens. Part of this phenomenon may come from Disney’s new elderly listenership. The traditional 7 to 11 core age bracket has been officially expanded to include 14-year-olds.
Obvious offenders like unacceptable language and sexually explicit content are still forbidden from any Radio Disney song. But whereas programming once actively avoided lyrical content relating to issues like parental separation and family trauma—including Blink-182’s “Stay Together for the Kids” and Everclear’s “Wonderful”—the abundance of angst on display at Radio Disney today is striking. Kelly Clarkson’s moving, paranoid ballad “Because of You” has a longstanding spot in the Top 30. The song details Clarkson’s conflicted thoughts about her parents, whose abusive relationship has instilled in her a fear of intimacy and the outside world.
“Because of you,” sings Clarkson, “I find it hard to trust not only myself but everyone around me/ Because of you/ I am afraid.”
Confessional rock geared toward tweens can be tracked to 2001, generally, when Michelle Branch and Avril Lavigne first gained popularity, though it arguably dates back further to include material like Britney Spears’s self-conscious ballads and M2M’s sugar-coated depictions of angst and heartbreak. Appropriately, both Ms of M2M, Marion Raven and Marit Larsen, have found respective niches in two very different confessional modes. Raven has embraced polished, Max Martin-produced angst-rock a la Kelly Clarkson, while Larsen has forged a more eclectic path, drawing from ABBA’s pop-veiled melancholia as well as musical arrangements and bittersweet lyricism from American pop country.
Strangely, the two central figures in the current American chart-pop angst-off, Ashlee Simpson and Lindsay Lohan, have not found a significant audience on Radio Disney. The station will not play either artists’ rawest and most emotional songs, and a recent Lindsay Lohan single was “kicked” during its Music Mailbag trial.
The station will, however, play almost all of Aly and AJ’s moody, confessional songs. The brooding nü-metal track “Sticks and Stones” depicts a theoretical confrontation with a bully in which the song’s protagonist claims that “in the end, you’ll be the victim/ You’re the one who has to live with yourself/ And when you’re reaching for help/ There’ll be no one/ There’s no one.”
Children may be exhibiting what Radio Disney Vice President of Marketing Sarah Stone has described in a previous interview with Jimmy Magahern as “K-GOY: Kids Getting Older Younger.” In the world of Radio Disney programming, the topics discussed in some of Aly and AJ, Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson’s songs are no longer deemed too depressing for child audiences.
If a new generation of gloomy confessional rock artists typify Radio Disney’s attempts to cater to a rapidly maturing young audience, the clean-cut
High School Musical cast marks another emerging trend in the world of teen pop: the rising influence of tweens and children on the overall pop market.
Pre-teens have had a significant impact on pop charts since the earliest days of bubblegum. In fact, many of Radio Disney’s most-played oldies in its first several years were originally propelled to the top of the charts by young audiences. But Internet sales have the potential to dramatically increase the direct influence of this age group on the pop charts.
When
High School Musical broke Billboard records, including the only simultaneous two-single debut of a female artist ever (by Ashley Tisdale, who at that point had never recorded any music under her own name—on the
High School Musical soundtrack and on Radio Disney she is credited only as “Sharpay”), it was exclusively through downloads. Major news media outlets ran the story as a cult success. But the line between the Billboard Top 40 and the Radio Disney Top 30 has never seemed more blurred.
One notable side effect of digital and Internet technology in the production and proliferation of teen pop is the Myspace networking phenomenon. As Saunders’ grade-schooler-fueled pop underground gains influence in mainstream pop, tween-friendly music has simultaneously moved to the “real” underground, a space once inhabited by aspiring indie rockers and below-the-radar music subcultures.
Online, one can find any number of glossy, meticulously produced pop acts who counter-intuitively proclaim their homemade production and “no label” status. Like many independent artists in other genres, indie teen poppers seek viable channels of distribution while self-producing their albums.
Some pop stars use Internet networking shrewdly to propel their multi-platform careers. Brie Larson, the star of tween-friendly films
Sleepover and
Hoot, uses her Myspace page to preview demos for her fans and devotes her blog to the minutiae of her everyday life like any other teenager. She also displays extensive musical and literary influences, from Big Star to Charles Bukowski to Henry Miller.
When I asked her (via Myspace comment) how she developed her networking skills, she replied, “From many years of working in the netting industry.”
Now, Radio Disney has taken to supporting teen pop artists struggling to find an audience. The station recently introduced its “incubaTor,” an up-and-coming artist feature that claims to be the place “where hits are hatched.” Early incubaTor artists included B5 and Sabrina Bryan of the Cheetah Girls, both of whom have had success on the Top 30. Artists like Cheyenne Kimball, Nikki Flores and the Jonas Brothers have used the incubaTor as part of a tween market saturation plan, and all three artists recently appeared on the soundtrack to kiddie mermaid movie
Aquamarine.
Other artists like Emma Roberts and Teddy Geiger have used the incubaTor as a stepping stone in a multi-platform cross-marketing process. Roberts also stars in the Nickelodeon series “Unfabulous” and, yes,
Aquamarine, and Sony artist Teddy Geiger impersonated an “independent” mope-rocker on the short-lived series “Love Monkey.” Did I mention he’s on the
Aquamarine soundtrack?
There are also lesser-known stars-to-be. DaHv is a 13-year-old female rapper from Boston whose jaw-droppingly silly singles “Pass the Shirley Temple” and “Mean Girls” have made slight novelty waves on the Internet and select radio stations across the country. The Truth Squad is a tween acting/dancing “supergroup” whose recorded output can be found nowhere outside Radio Disney. Elijah Harris and Jacob Latimore are precocious 11-year-old hip-hop and R&B artists. And Jessie Daniels, who is friends with Jesus on her Myspace page, released the single “The Noise,” which did well on Christian rock charts.
Ten years after its first broadcast, Radio Disney no longer represents a benevolent broadcaster of modern tween musical fare. Disney has exerted definitive control over the means of producing most teen pop. Other labels that once supported popular artists in the genre, like Jive Records, have since moved on to different, if not greener, pastures, and Disney has used its control over other forms of children’s media to make the strategic move to music production.
But at the same time, Disney’s increasing—and perhaps totalizing—control has created an efficient, consolidated market force whose influence on the overall landscape of contemporary pop music continues to grow, even to the realm of music criticism, where convenient shorthand for dismissing teen pop artists (including terms like “prefab”) is quickly being nullified.
In this context, gap-bridging artists like Kelly Clarkson may be the Trojan horse that irrevocably brings teen pop as a genre into widely accepted critical legitimacy. But Radio Disney is helming another transformation—the transition of pop market control from the key 18-24 market to the 6-14 demographic. Affordable media purchasing options, such as the iTunes allowance system, let downloads replace the need for cash or mobility to purchase music, allowing children to become music consumers far more easily.
Disney is well aware of the unique online spending power of its audience and has taken steps to capitalize further on the unforeseen success of
High School Musical. The theme song to the new Disney Channel series “Hannah Montana” is already working its way up the Radio Disney Top 30,” and Disney has for the first time made individual series episodes available as iTunes video downloads. The show is already the highest-rated series in the channel’s history.
In 2000, Saunders predicted a rough timeline of teen pop dominance that he claimed would easily continue through 2010. In 2006, it seems that the genre’s longevity and the influence that the genre’s nearly-solo provider, Disney, has on the future of pop music are even more staggering. By 2010, perhaps Radio Disney’s catch phrase “We’re all ears” will signify something more insidious or exciting, depending on your taste in music.
SKYE FRIDAY EDIT:
Part of Your World (YSI only)
