Looking to grab a slice of the lucrative concert business, Razor & Tie Entertainment will next week launch an 80-city tour tied to its wildly successful Kidz Bop series, which features regular children singing the latest chart-topping hits.
The tour, which kicks off next Friday in Davenport, Iowa, is set to play venues seating between 2,000 and 6,000 people and has signed up sponsors including Dodge and Juicy Juice.
In launching the tour, Kidz Bop – which last year sold out two of three test shows and led founders Cliff Chenfeld and Craig Balsam to conclude that demand was high enough to make a full-scale tour profitable – joins a growing list of live music events competing for kids’ and tweens’ entertainment dollars.
Last year, for instance, Disney launched a tour tied to “High School Musical” that played to an average audience of 14,000 people and grossed $35.8 million over the course of 71 shows, according to data from concert industry tracker Pollstar. Total figures are actually higher since Pollstar didn’t have data for three U.S. cities and a Buenos Aires show.
This year Kidz Bop will face off on the road with two Disney tours, Miley Cyrus’ Hannah Montana tour “Best of Both Worlds,” which has already sold out numerous venues, and The Doodlebops, which kicks off with a show at Madison Square Garden tomorrow.
Overall, the concert industry this year is on pace to break the record $3.6 billion in North American ticket sales rung up in 2006.
“We haven’t seen this kind of excitement for shows among pre-teens since the days of the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync,” said Pollstar’s Gary Bon Giovanni. “It has been an underserved market in recent years, but people are starting to pay attention to it.”
The Kidz Bop franchise has sold more than 10 million albums over the course of 12 editions.