Disney Success Defies RIAA Logic by George Ziemann -- Sept. 1, 2007 As the parent of a "tweener", it was impossible to ignore last year's best selling-album, High School Musical, which seems to have been equally popular in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Brazil, Australia, Venezuela and New Zealand, according to Wikipedia's entry. I've also been listening to the deluded ramblings of record execs and the RIAA over the past few years and, if they are to be believed, Disney did it all wrong. With High School Musical 2 in its second week at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts (which is already equal to the time the first one spent at the top spot), having bumped 14-year old Mylie Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana, now at No. 3), it's pretty obvious that Hollywood Records (Disney's record label) isn't paying attention to the program that the rest of the industry is on. First of all, Disney does not appear to be suing its fans, unlike every other record label on the planet. I found a couple of lawsuits against companies where they were one of the plaintiffs, but couldn't find where they were a party to one of the lawsuits against individuals. It doesn't mean they haven't done it, just that I couldn't find one. The RIAA strategy seems to depend on artificial scarcity. The major labels seem intent on making it harder and harder to hear their artists' music without paying for it first. They've relentlessly attacked every digital distribution method. Most of them they simply litigate out of existence (Napster, Grokster, iMesh, Kazaa, etc.). With iTunes, they allowed it to be considered legal, but have bitched about the low price since day one. The labels think you should be paying $2.50 to $3.50 for each song and 99 cents is making them crazy. Now they're punishing webcasters with ridiculous royalty rates and are hoping to do the same thing to broadcast radio and television, thereby insuring that their artists get less and less exposure. That'll sell more records, eh? Disney is acting like the digital era has changed nothing. They still believe in ubiquity. Someone there seems to think that maybe if you can hear the songs more than once, you might be more inclined to buy the album. They do have two things that the rest of the record labels do not have which allow them to take this approach -- a cable channel and Disney radio. The rest of the industry is stuck with MTV and Clear Channel. The first High School Musical ran non-stop on the Disney Channel for like a week when it first came out. This was followed by the karaoke version, the "learn-the-dance-steps" version, the "pop-up" version and one or two versions I may have missed, all given a solid block of repetition to make sure every kid in the world had a chance to see it at least five or six times. At least. Before I go to the next paragraph, you've got to remember that I'm a 52, an old hippie who likes The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Deep Purple. I can't hear the music in rap music, I think hip-hop is like the return of the Frankensteinian disco fad that kills live music opportunities, and pop music has always been lame. That said, I've been hearing the Disney Channel from the other room for several years now. Kind of liked Ally and AJ's cover of "Do You Believe in Magic?" There's a song called "1985" by the Jonas Brothers that's not too bad. I can probably identify more songs by Hannah Montana than Maroon 5, Linkin Park, Amy Winehouse, White Stripes or the Arctic Monkeys. It's not because I particularly like Hannah Montana better than the Arctic Monkeys, but I hear her music; the Arctic Monkeys have failed to make their way into my ear canal for the first time. When I was a kid, you heard new music on the radio. Disney's got that covered, too. In Phoenix, Disney Radio is an AM station. The kids don't care that AM sucks because they don't listen like that. It's playing the songs from the Disney Channel. And that is enough for them. These kids are dragging their parents to the live shows, too, something I definitely did not want to happen when I first started going to concerts. This difference has an impact on the box office. You can still buy tickets for a Sept. 18 Smashing Pumpkins' show at the 4,000-seat Dodge Theatre in Phoenix. You can still get Hootie and the Blowfish tickets for their Oct. 12 show at the 19,000-seat Jobing.com Arena in Glendale. But Mylie Cyrus/Hannah Montana's November 7 show at the arena is already sold out. As far as I can tell, there's only one major flaw in the Disney's well-oiled machinery. When their child stars come out the other end, they tend to turn into Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan.