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Kidz Bop Sanitizing Top 40 One Hit At A Time

06/25/2013
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(Radio.com) No one grows up with the Kidz Bop Kids � theirs is not music you return to with nostalgic fondness. But for more than a decade, Razor & Tie Records has sold millions of copies of Kidz Bop � their compilation series of sanitized Top 40 covers � to pre-adolescents and their culturally concerned parents. Busy parents that don't want their kids to listen to Britney with progeny that don't want to listen to Barney.

In an age when Rihanna dominates the airwaves with praise for the tenets of sado-masochism, Kidz Bop satisfies a need for strict parents and their kids. But theirs is by nature an ephemeral audience; at some point, every kid that was ever into Kidz Bop comes to the harsh realization that it is just not very cool.

"At the time that I did it, I was at the age where Kidz Bop was not cool," says Amanda LaMotte, a New York-based actress and Kidz Bop veteran. "I didn't want my friends to know, and I didn't want to tell anyone. There were infomercials all the time for the DVDs, and my friends would be over and we'd be watching something on TV and I'd be like, 'We gotta change the channel.'"

Cool or not, Kidz Bop sells. Kidz Bop 23, released in January, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart. It was the fifth Kidz Bop release to do so. There's nothing to suggest that Kidz Bop 24, set to drop on July 19 with covers of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' "Thrift Shop" and Psy's "Gangnam Style," will be much less successful, regardless of what the cool kids say. So how did an indie label started by two lawyer dads with no hipster cred manage to get generation after generation of preteens to propel them towards the top of the charts? How do co-founders Craig Balsam and Cliff Chenfeld continue to sell CDs to kids when few still can? more on this story

Radio.com is an official news provider for antiMusic.com.
Copyright Radio.com/CBS Local - Excerpted here with permission.

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