It’s been interesting to watch how music marketing has evolved over the past decade.  At the turn of the millennium, boy bands and pop starlets were riding higher than ever before, By marketing those acts to young teens (girls in particular), the music industry enjoyed the last great boom of the pre-download era.  Increased segmenting of FM radio audiences, MTV’s programming shift to reality shows, and the rise of Napster and file-sharing would eventually  bring that boom to a screeching halt.  The record industry no longer had any single channel, station, or format to expose their pop acts to an audience. 

“American Idol” and the Disney Channel stepped in to fill the void.  “Idol” wedded the popular game-show format of programs like “Star Search” and “Survivor” with older songs that shrinking record labels were happy to pay to have broadcast on network television.  The Disney Channel took the pop starlet/boy band model and scaled back the performers’ ages for an even younger audience.  Then Disney marketed new music by inserting it into hyped-up TV movies and television shows. 

Has television saved popular music, or destroyed it?  Only time will tell whether the Jonas Brothers or any of a dozen American Idols will score a hit song remembered for many years.  What seems, certain, though, is that they are symbolic of a strange era for the music industry, one which finds the album format gradually disappearing.  Soon, today’s “tween” stars will grow up and fade away.  When that happens, relics of today’s era of Disneyfied pop like the Disney Mix Stick Plus 2GB Jonas Brothers MP3 Player are sure to be worth a pretty penny as nostalgic reminders of one of America’s strangest decades.