Nickelodeon Execs Notice <i>High School Musical</i> Soundtrack Sales, Comedy Lightbulb Goes Off

Reflecting the record industry fully ceding its destiny to the prepubescents, the title of this story puts it right out there: “Nickelodeon Looks For Its Own H.S. Musical.” But it’s not just the networks, because the blood-starved major labels are also lining up to suck whatever life is left out of virginal HSM. Nick’s entry is called (uh) the Naked Brothers, a coed pack of off-brand Jonas Brothers who star on the “top-rated show for kids 6-11 on ad-supported cable, averaging 1.6 million live viewers since its premiere and often garnering 10 million total viewers through the course of seven days,” according to Advertising Age. The Naked Brother (sorry, that’s just not going to stop being weird to me any time soon) are under the stewardship of one Doug Cohn, former Atlantic Records marketing exec and current intermediary between Viacom and Sony on their “newly created joint venture” to blanket the earth with the Naked Brothers. And “blanket” is right, because the saturation bombing promotional strategy Cohn describes means the group will shortly be inescapable:

MediaWorks: Since the Naked Brothers is the first act to come out of the new partnership with Sony Music, what are your goals?

Doug Cohn: There’s no previous model to base it on. They did a great job writing great songs, so the company’s throwing the whole building behind it. … As part of the MTV Networks family, everyone’s been incredibly supportive of us going in uncharted territory. So we’ve got the guys going on “TRL,” MTV’s doing a leak for the record, they even have a page on VH1.com. So there’s a lot of family love here. It’s an A-list album release for Sony as well — they’re the artist of month on AOL, they’re on the home page of Yahoo, Nat and Alex [Wolff] have a MySpace page. I’ve worked at record companies for enough years to see this as an A-level release hitting every target that you would for every A-list artist. We’ve been in countless meetings saying, “What else can we do? What haven’t we done?” And as the meetings get shorter we feel like we’ve gotten closer to what we set out to accomplish.

Because what they’ve set out to accomplish is nothing less than pulling the record industry back from the brink by cross-platform pimping another bunch of tweener Monkees until the wheels fall off the “new” business model. Also, you see, instead of the (by now well known) Ballad Of The Jonas Bros.–their first record bouncing off radio, being forced to retreat to Disney-owned broadcasting outlets to find the success they can now rub in the industry’s face–the Naked Brothers only stand to benefit out of the gate from Viacom and Sony jointly owning a gigantic fucking chunk of the enertainment industry (and buying their way into the the parts they don’t already have control over). I’d make a tired-ass Borg joke here, but I think used up my geek reference allotment for the day on that Coheed and Cambria post.

Nickelodeon Looks For Its Own ‘H.S. Musical'” [Advertising Age]