A few weeks back, I attempted to provide some sense of the relative popularity of various family musicians by taking a look at the quasi-objective metric of Facebook fans. The purpose of the review was not to start fights between artists. As I noted in the piece...

1) I know that the number of fans someone has on Facebook has nothing to with quality or talent or anything. Mostly. 2) I'm not trying to start any fights between artists. [See? I wasn't kidding!] 3) As someone who considers how to bring artists in concert to a place that's not New York or DC where concerts happen weekly, the lack of hard data in evaluating an artist's popularity does not help. I can tell you exactly who I would bring in if attendance and cost were no object. But they are.

Nor was I attempting to be exhaustive in my review of artists (as soon as I finished, I came up with another half-dozen artists I could have mentioned). If you're an artist at the level of the folks I mentioned, then perhaps you're doing OK. But Facebook isn't a perfect proxy. (Again, as I noted... "it's a poor proxy for album sales and possibly for concert attendance, and it's a single data source.") So this piece is a second -- and definitely not the last -- way to look at popularity. (Hence my new title for the series - "Kindie-Chartin'.") I decided to look at Sirius-XM's Kids Place Live. The station, likely has the largest audience of any family music radio station, especially since it broadcasts kids music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (It also has nearly 11,000 fans on its own Facebook page.) As such, songs that do well there are songs that have resonated with a large group of kids on a national basis. Clearly, interest on the part of the DJs there have some influence on what does and doesn't get played, but when you're programming as much live music as KPL does, you need to respect what kids do (and don't) respond to. One way to evaluate airplay would be to search playlists, but that would take forever just to get a "point-in-time" view of whatever artists I (or you) feel like searching. Better (and perhaps easier) to look at their weekly "13 Under 13" broadcasts, which count down thirteen of the most popular songs on the station for the past week. Music director and DJ Robbie Schaefer describes the list as a "subjective snapshot of our live shows for that week," reflecting not only programmed spins and listener requests, but also the more nebulous concept of "momentum," which might take into account responses on Facebook and listener e-mails. In other words -- and this is my phrasing, not Schaefer's -- the list is as much art as science. But, it's put together by DJs who are spending many hours a week interacting with their listeners and who get reminded repeatedly when songs do (or don't) get a reaction from their audience.