It's a critical time in the music industry, and record labels are hoping to prevent overall sales from dropping for a sixth year out of the past seven. The runaway success of an album targeted squarely at tweens (children between of 8 and 12 years of age) highlights the growing importance to record labels of younger and younger fans, as historical core buyers - teenagers and college students - have slowed their legal music consumption.
As a result, some of the biggest sellers of 2006 - from Disney's "High School Musical" and "Cheetah Girls" soundtracks to the "Kidz Bop" series - are those aimed at the grade-school set.
"Hannah Montana" is a fictional pop star who exists only on the 10-month-old Disney Channel series of the same name. On the show, 14-year-old actress Miley Cyrus plays a seemingly regular high-school student named Miley Stewart who secretly moonlights as a pop star named Hannah Montana.
The 13-song "Hannah" disc, featuring Miley in character as her small-screen alter-ego Hannah, has remained in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 album chart since its release.
During that same period, many new titles by stars, even those that debuted high on the chart, have plummeted quickly.
Miley Cyrus, whose father is '90s country star Billy Ray Cyrus of "Achy Breaky Heart" fame, says she is gratified by the soundtrack's success, particularly because she considers acting a sideline. "Singing was always my main thing," the teenager said in a telephone interview.
She calls following her father into the upper reaches of the sales charts "so crazy." Her dad plays her father and manager on the show.
Music releases from Hannah Montana and another 'tween act, The Cheetah Girls, are aided by the fact that both are featured regularly on the Disney Channel and Radio Disney.
Another factor that has helped lift the kids' market relative to other genres: Very young children are less apt to engage in online piracy and more likely to need the physical compact disc to hear the music.
Pre-teens "can be counted on to buy a CD," says Bob Cavallo, chairman of Walt Disney Co.'s Buena Vista Music Group.
"Young people, but also their moms and grandmoms - those people don't steal music, for the most part."
The explosion of music targeted at very young children also represents a shift from music industry marketing tactics of the late 1990s, when pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera ruled the pop charts. Such sexually charged performers were difficult to shoehorn onto family-oriented outlets like the Disney Channel - despite the fact that both Spears and Aguilera were Mouseketeers early in their careers.
The arrival in 2001 of Hilary Duff, then 15, and her "Lizzie McGuire" character heralded an era of teen stars deemed wholesome enough by executives and parents to market to the youngest fans. The 2003 "Lizzie McGuire Movie" soundtrack has been certified double platinum by the RIAA; Duff's album "Metamorphosis" is triple platinum.
Music aimed at the prepubescent has become so successful that it is quickly becoming the basis for several franchises.
Following the multimillion-selling success of the Kidz Bop albums, its creators are now staging a touring version of the singalong series.
"High School Musical" has spun off a concert tour and two forthcoming major-label albums by cast members Ashley Tisdale and Corbin Bleu. Disney is now planning a "Hannah Montana" concert tour for next summer, in which Miley may perform half the show in character as Hannah and half as herself.
In the wake of the success of her TV character, Miley is working to establish her own musical identity. One performance on the "Hannah" soundtrack is credited to Miley Cyrus, not to Hannah Montana - a duet with her father called "I Learned From You." Miley says her father is "a total perfectionist " who recorded multiple takes of his vocal parts and pushed her to do the same.
"That was a good experience the first time," she says. "But I don't know when I'll be doing it again."
She is now working on an album to be released under her own name.
"Everybody knows Miley Stewart," says Miley. "And everybody knows Hannah Montana. But people don't know Miley Cyrus, the person underneath.
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