Disney taps wants, wallets of 'tweens
'Hannah' spawns CD, sensation
Lindsay Schrier, a 10-year-old from Quincy, wants to be a librarian when she grows up, or a writer, or an acting-and-singing superstar. So when she flipped on the Disney Channel one day last summer and discovered "Hannah Montana" -- a sitcom about a teenage girl with a secret life as a pop sensation -- she could instantly relate. Before long, she was perfecting her "Hannah Montana" choreography.
Hers is not the first household to report a new infusion of squeaky-clean pop. That's the sound that surrounds many 'tween girls these days -- that, and the clink of cash registers. The "Hannah Montana" soundtrack debuted nationwide last week as the number-one album on the Billboard charts, beating new CDs from MTV fave My Chemical Romance and Grammy winner John Legend. It was the first-ever television soundtrack to debut at number one.
It's a sign of the purchasing power of 8- to 14-year-old girls. And it's proof of how well the Disney Channel has managed, in recent years, to figure out what 'tweens want. The soundtrack to the TV movie "High School Musical" is the best selling album of 2006 to date, selling more than 3 million copies , and has spun off a tour featuring its stars as well as a show that high schools and middle schools can perform. The sitcom "That's So Raven" has inspired a successful clothing and home-decoration line. The soundtrack to "Cheetah Girls 2" debuted this year at number five on the Billboard charts.
This hasn't made the record industry happy, says Samantha Skey, senior vice president at Alloy Media + Marketing, a New York-based marketing firm. But
But it does have money. Tweens spend $30 million of their own money each year, Alloy estimates, and influence $126 million in spending by their parents. And more and more, she said, they get their music from TV.
"Hannah Montana," starring 13-year-old Miley Cyrus, seems to have struck a particular chord. Since it debuted in March , the show has been rated number one on basic cable among 6-to-11 and 9-to-14 year-olds. Across all of TV, "Hannah" is rated number two in those age groups, second only to "American Idol" -- to which, says Adam Bonnett, the Disney Channel's head of original programming, his show owes a fair amount of inspiration.
The "Hannah" story, after all, ties into newfound possibilities of instant stardom and hidden talent. Its main character, Miley Stewart, moves from Tennessee to Malibu, Calif., with her brother and songwriter father -- played by the star's real-life father, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus. But while TV Miley has a glamorous alter ego, she tries to hide her stardom from her schoolmates.
The Disney Channel has done much to position Hannah Montana as a star; the network filmed a concert before the show even premiered. The soundtrack, which debuted on Oct. 24, features eight original songs by Miley Cyrus as " Hannah Montana," and additional songs by such mainstream pop acts as The Click Five and Jesse McCartney . A week after its release, 281,000 copies had been sold.
There's something about the "Hannah" fantasy that seems to set 'tweens aflutter. This week, Schrier and some of her friends, decked in pink and fluffy gear inspired by the show, sat around a dining room table and gushed. They talked about why they like live-action shows more than cartoons. ("You can't get SpongeBob's autograph," Schrier said.) They spoke of imagining themselves in Hannah's place.
"It could happen," said Kelly Donahue, 9. "You could end up being a singer like her."
It seems an accessible fantasy for 'tweens, in a reality-TV age when stardom seems closer than ever; one mother at the gathering reported that her daughter often asks if she can go to Hollywood for the weekend.
But the girls liked the concept that Hannah has a normal life, too.
"So you could just turn off the autographs and the fans when you want to just have fun with your friends," Schrier said.
The "Hannah Montana" juggernaut owes something to that network of 'tween friendships; this is a show that spread virally, thanks to instant-messaging networks and the ability to view the video streamed on the Disney website at all hours .
Schrier's mother, Gail Spring, says her daughter has watched videos online and taped "Hannah Montana" marathons. When she learned about a "Hannah Montana" lip-synching contest, co sponsored by Radio Disney and the Girl Scouts of America, she photocopied the announcement and walked it to her friends, door-to-door.
The event, held on October 14 at Curry College, was huge by local Girl Scout standards, drawing 150 girls, said Stacy Wilbur, a spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts Patriots Trail Council. There was a winner -- Tori Heinlein, a 6-year-old from Dover -- but most of the kids went home with prizes.
The parents walked away with praise for Disney. "Everybody left happy," said Andrea Kiley, whose 8-year-old daughter, McKenna, has sent e-mails to the show's website, saying she wishes Hannah were her sister.
That's proof of the resurgence of the Disney brand, said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, who has watched the company rise, fall, and rise again in its influence over kids' lives.
"Disney, of course, had a total grip on American childhood for a good part of the 20th century," Thompson said. But Nickelodeon established itself as a formidable rival, he said, eschewing Disney's gentle animation in favor of a new crop of ironic cartoons. Shows such as "SpongeBob SquarePants" and the "Fairly OddParents" were just off-kilter enough to make parents snicker, he said, and even appealed to cynical older brothers and sisters.
But Disney's new crop of shows, Thompson said, show that straightforward innocence can find a market, too.
"They're not aping Nickelodeon," he said of Disney. "They're essentially taking what their old franchise was, which is just squeaky clean innocent naive kinds of things, but updating them with the iconography of modern youth."
It's a tactic that works with parents, who say they like the way Hannah wears costumes that cover most of her body , and the fact that Cyrus's real-life father plays her father on the show.
But Bonnett insists "Hannah Montana" has a level of sophistication, too, in part because it draws from industry veterans. Thanks, in part, to the dearth of sitcoms on broadcast TV, the writer pool stems comes from the grown-up comedy world. The show is run by veterans of "Cybill" and "Murphy Brown."
As with all Disney Channel shows, Bonnett said, the mandate is to place ordinary, accessible kids in extraordinary circumstances. The networks' newest show, which premieres next month, is a spinoff of "That's So Raven" called "Cory in the House," in which the son of a chef goes to live in the White House. Bonnett hopes it will be a "Hannah"-sized hit among preteen boys.
It will be another tale of friendships and parent-child relationships, Bonnett said. But he chafes at the idea that it will be "wholesome."
"Sometimes 'wholesome' can imply that it might be a little phony," he said. "I like the word 'optimistic,' because I think that's what kids want."
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. She blogs at www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog.
(Correction: Because of a reporting error, a Page One story yesterday on the Disney Channel show "Hannah Montana" misstated the financial impact of purchasing by 8- to 14-year-olds, as tabulated by Alloy Media + Marketing. The firm estimates the annual market as $30 billion in spending by children and $126 billion by parents. Also, because of an editing error, the caption accompanying a photo from the show misidentified singer/actor Billy Ray Cyrus.)
