Mixing familiar staples like Raffi with new children’s tunes by rock performers like Little Richard and the Replacements, AAHS is hoping to ride the recent boom in children’s entertainment. The latest hot track? The Chipmunks’ version of Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart.” In the evening, the station airs segments on parenting skills, including one recent debate on-uh-oh, kids-discipline. To keep AAHS on kids’ wavelength, network owner Christopher Dahl, 49, has hired five kid deejays and named Jimmy Freeman, 11, to an enviable post: vice president of fun.
Radio AAHS aims to educate while it entertains. Richard Weinberg, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, says, “The key thing is that it allows kids to exercise their imagination. They’re able to create their own images.” AAHS’s music and games almost always carry a positive message. The station nixed the Chipmunks’ rendition of Mary-Chapin Carpenter’s “I Feel Lucky,” in part because it sang of crossing the street against the light.
Dahl isn’t alone in championing children’s radio. Others, including the giant ABC Radio Networks, are considering joining the airwaves. The reason is simple demographics. As Dahl notes, 17 percent of the population are children, and radio largely ignores them. But previous kid stations have foundered. The Imagination Stations, a syndicated program similar to Radio AAHS, folded in 1991 after only nine months on the air. One backer, Norman Wain, says, “I lost a fortune in it.” Advertisers are wary because they don’t know how many kids radio reaches. Arbitron, which tracks radio audiences, doesn’t count kids under 13. (AAHS commissioned its own survey in Minneapolis that showed the station No. 1 among 4- to 9-year-olds and No. 2 among families.) Sam Michaelson, a Saatchi & Saatchi vice president who buys radio commercials, says, “I believe the medium is special. But kids today are more into pictures and sound bites.”
Dahl, however, is thinking big. “I’d love to get Chelsea Clinton on the air for about 15 minutes a week,” he says. Even Wain, whose first effort was a wash, says of kid radio, “It’s too good an idea to die.” He and his partner are looking for investors to fund another try. Attracting investors is one thing. The challenge, however, is to convince kids that entertainment is better heard but not seen.
PHOTO: Staying on the right wavelength: VP of fun, Freeman, gets busy in the AAHS studio (PAUL SHAMBROOM)
