We started these awards in 2006 along with Amy Davis to highlight what a new crop of kids music writers and radio programmers (along with some kids music veterans) thought was the best of the year's kids music. The year 2006 saw a tremendous increase in the visibility of kids music, both by musicians who had been working hard since before the beginning of the decade (Dan Zanes, Laurie Berkner, Justin Roberts, among others) and new voices. These would be awards decided on by careful listeners, not musicians, and would not require application fees or make the creators money. It would be at least less difficult to game the system in ways that we thought the Grammy Awards were sometimes gamed in the Children's Music category. The awards were inspired by the venerable "Pazz & Jop Awards," which solicited critics' Top 10 lists (initially and primarily albums) across a broad variety of musical releases.
From the perspective of Bill and Stefan, we think that the Awards did a good job of highlighting what outside observers thought were the very best kids music albums of the year, particularly right around the time that Grammy Awards were being voted on.
And it was fun. As coordinators, we loved tallying the votes from across the country, reaching out to new judges (well more than 50 voted in at least one poll over the years), and finding out which albums struck a chord with a wide range of listeners.
The recorded music industry of 2019, however, looks very different from the recorded music industry of 2006. The same technologies that made it so much easier for more artists to record their music and distribute it widely also led to the rise of the streaming music services, and with that the diminishment of the album in terms of its cultural relevance. Those kids who were singing "We Are the Dinosaurs" along with Laurie Berkner in 1998 are now in their mid-20s and will be starting families soon if they haven't already. Some of them could still buy albums, but most of them are probably streaming music on one service or another (and usually not a full album at a time), and there's no reason to think they'll change how they listen to music when their kids arrive.
At the same time, the music writing industry (though "industry" should probably be put in quotation marks) of 2019 also looks very different from the music writing industry of 2006. There are, quite simply, fewer of us dedicating a lot of time to listening to and writing about kids music in public forums, in part because of the changes in the way we listen to music, but also for other reasons.
As a result, we have decided that this will be the final set of Fids & Kamily Awards. We want the awards to end while we're still having some fun putting these votes together, and not let the awards die a protracted death as judges slowly retreat from the genre. We will keep the Fids & Kamily website running for years to come, but don't plan to resurrect the awards in the future.
We hope that people interested in supporting kids music come up with another way to celebrate the genre. We'd love to participate in that effort; this is not the end of our other roles in the family music world! But Fids & Kamily's time has ended.
Finally, of course we want to thank all the musicians whose albums gave us so much happiness over the years of voting, as well as thank all the readers and families and librarians who found these Awards useful in putting together their own collections. But for the purposes of these Awards, we want to thank all the judges who participated at whatever level over the years. As noted above, more than 50 people participated as judges over the years, and whatever success F&K had in denting the popular consciousness is due to the efforts of judges in voting, and then sharing the results. Thank you so much, all of you, for your help over the years. We love you all.
Thanks,
Stefan and Bill
