Still squeaky clean
Kidz Bop continues to reinvent itself in streaming era
Several years ago Vic Zaraya, the president of the music brand Kidz Bop, was having lunch with a senior music-industry executive. At the time Zaraya was also the president of Razor & Tie, the independent label that released Kidz
Bop albums until 2018.
“Kidz Bop is our Adele,” Zaraya told his lunch companion. The executive laughed.
If anything, Zaraya was underselling the standing of Kidz Bop, whose live tour will visit the Ohio State Fair on July 24.
The series began in 2001 as a lark: an album of current pop hits sung by tweens with sanitized, safe-forall-ages lyrics. Two lawyers with a passion for music, Cliff Chenfeld and Craig Balsam, had formed Razor & Tie in 1990, initially selling compilations such as “Monster Ballads” (1999) via direct-to-consumer television commercials that were
themselves kitschy delights. They applied the strategy to Kidz Bop, and the lark became a startlingly successful, still-running series of albums.
Kidz Bop has scored big with versions of songs such as Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” (2004), Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” (2014) and Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” (2014).
Since 2001, more than 20 million Kidz Bop albums have been sold and, during a remarkable run between 2005 and 2015, the rotating crew of Kidz Bop Kids earned 22 Billboard Top 10 albums. In fact, only three artists — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Barbra Streisand — have more Top 10 albums than the Kidz Bop Kids. Adele has three.
However, the series’ exceptional chart success has evaporated in recent years. None of Kidz Bop’s past seven albums has reached Billboard’s Top 10, and three of the past four haven’t cracked the Top 40.
“One of the problems is the idea of a compilation is somewhat obsolete,” said Vickie Nauman, founder of Cross Border Works, a music-industry consulting group. “Compilations filled a need because they were portable, curated and a way to sample different artists without buying 10 albums. But playlists are the new compilations.”
The series’ chart struggles coincide with an overall sea change in how people consume music. Between 2015 and 2018 streaming grew from 35% to 75% of the music market in the United States. Can Kidz Bop surge again or pivot — or is it going to become a fading relic of the CD era?
The Kidz Bop concept grew from Chenfeld’s and Balsam’s experiences ferrying their own elementary-school-age children to birthday parties. (Both left Kidz Bop last year, after Razor & Tie was absorbed by Concord Music.) The music played at these events tended toward either groaninducing jingles aimed at younger children — think Barney or the Wiggles — or hits by the likes of Britney Spears or Eminem that frequently contained language and themes inappropriate for 8-year-olds.
Kidz Bop steers clear of risque songs and rewrites potentially offending lyrics. Kidz Bop albums became something parents and kids could agree on, ideal for the minivan’s CD player.
“Kidz Bop identified this need and super-served a particular audience, which is kids and parents willing to let their kids play these CDS on repeat,” Nauman said.
With CD players disappearing from those minivans, Kidz Bop debuted its own Sirius XM channel in 2014. That’s where Geoff Boothroyd and his daughters, 9-year-old Claire and 7-year-old Caitlyn, first discovered the series.
“I was actually dismissive of the station, but the girls were like, ‘Oh, I’ve heard this song before! Daddy, don’t change it!”’ Boothroyd said. “It works well, because I know that it’s age-appropriate and not going to end up with curse words and such.”
For parents today, controlling their children’s access to music can be an all-or-nothing proposition. Parental controls on Spotify, Youtube or Apple Music are often unwieldy and unreliable, a broadsword solution to a problem that needs a scalpel.
This helps explain why Kidz Bop has managed to continue selling CDS long after the rest of the industry wrote them off as viable products. While Kidz Bop’s total album sales — the number of CDS plus digital downloads sold, according to data from Nielsen — have dipped from 818,000 in 2016 to 410,000 in 2018, that drop-off is comparatively modest. Drake sold 1.9 million albums in 2016, but only 436,000 last year. More than 330,000 of Kidz Bop’s 2018 sales were physical CDS — nearly three times as many as Drake.
Its streaming numbers are actually growing — from a little more than 300 million total streams in 2016 to 833 million last year — and they’re on pace to top a billion for the first time this year. However, those stats don’t put the brand in the same echelon it once inhabited. According to Nielsen’s music-consumption data, the Kidz Bop Kids ranked 120th among all artists in 2018.
“The transition from albums to where we are now was challenging,” Zaraya said. “As we watched the CD business decline and the streaming business was slow to grow, we had to start spending and thinking really creatively about how we reach new consumers.”
Kidz Bop launched its Youtube channel in 2014, which now has more than 1.3 million subscribers. New music videos, as well as instructional-dance and behind-the-scenes videos, are uploaded weekly.
“We have our own inhouse production team,” said Sasha Junk, Kidz Bop’s senior vice president for marketing. “We’re producing 150 music videos annually.”
When Junk joined the company, 10 years ago, one of her core ideas was to transform the Kidz Bop Kids, which had previously been a collection of studio performers, into a troupe of 10-to 14-year-olds who starred in music videos, made public appearances and did live performances. “Now they’re the faces of the brand,” she said.
Some of those faces went on to bigger things
— in addition to Zendaya, Olivia Holt, Becky G and Ross Lynch were all once Kidz Bop Kids — which has given the group a hint of the star-factory cachet of Disney’s latter-day “Mickey Mouse Club” (1989-1995), which featured Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling.
Full Kidz Bop Kids tours began in earnest in 2014, but initially were mostly a loss leader, playing venues with a capacity of 500 to 1,500. “The tour was something on the side that would push our music and brand,” Anderson said. “Now it’s its own beast.”
The shows are tightly choreographed affairs, complete with video screens, confetti, pyrotechnics and four Kidz Bop Kids occasionally playing live instruments while running through
60 to 90 minutes of songs. In the past three years, the tours have sold a halfmillion tickets, and this summer’s 50-city trek is hitting outdoor amphitheaters and arenas.
Last year the Hard Rock Hotel in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, debuted the Kidz Bop Experience, a sort of Kidz Bop fantasy camp where kids can learn dance moves, write songs, design album covers and star in their own videos. This year, a second Kidz Bop Experience opened at a Hard Rock in Mexico.
The brand faces some unique challenges, though. For starters, their fans inevitably grow out of their fandom — not that Junk is worried.
“You have new kids being born every day,” Junk said, “so our core audience is constantly repopulating itself.”