Nine-year-old Melissa Langley made sure to catch “High School Musical” when the made-for-TV movie debuted on the Disney Channel in January.
Since then, the fourth-grader has watched it three or four more times, bought the soundtrack and taught herself a few of the dance numbers from the movie.
“I just really like the songs,” Melissa says. “When I fall to sleep, sometimes I listen to the songs.”
“High School Musical” is pretty much her favorite thing on TV right now, along with “Zoey 101,” “Hannah Montana” and “Tom and Jerry.”
Melissa is a tween – a kid between the ages of 9 and 12 – and if the only one of her faves you knew was the classic cat-and-mouse cartoon, well, you’re not a tween, and you probably don’t have one living under your roof.
And before you dismiss all this as kids’ stuff, consider this: Tweens are big business, a powerful entertainment audience – the soundtrack to “High School Musical,” for example, twice hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart last month.
The series and movies they watch on networks such as the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon are among the highest-rated on all of cable TV.
With roughly 25 million tweens in the United States, the money they spend – or influence their families to spend – totals more than $50 billion a year, by many industry and media estimates.
Yet even as their viewership makes hits of TV shows, movies and music, it remains a hidden audience.
“When we won for Best Kids Show, we wanted to go out and celebrate,” says Drake Bell, 19, star of “Drake and Josh” on Nickelodeon, which won several awards at the Kids Choice Awards earlier this month.
“With the Oscars, you can go out and celebrate and everybody’s, ‘Woo hoo, the Oscar winners!’ ” says Bell, who won Best Actor at the awards show. “With this, everyone who knew who we were was in bed by 8 p.m.”
To understand the cultural phenomenon of tween TV – and increasingly, its spinoffs into music, the Internet and shopping – look to the early 1990s, when kid-oriented cable channels started to fill a niche abandoned by the broadcast networks.
“I think the networks used to try to program for kids and family,” says Dan Schneider, who acted on one such show – “Head of the Class” – in the 1980s before going on to create tween programs such as “The Amanda Show,” “Drake and Josh” and “Zoey 101.”
“Sometime in the early to mid-’90s, 8 p.m. television went away from family to being ‘Friends’ – and you really don’t want your 10-year-old watching ‘Friends,’ ” Schneider says.
