Lucrative Lullabies : Discovery Music Waking Up Market for Newborn Listeners and Their Parents

In the “thirtysomething” era of aerobics videos for kids, fetal phones to talk to the not-yet-born and gourmet baby food, it seems inevitable that someone would produce music for infants.

Fivesomething years ago, record industry veteran Ellen Wohlstadter, 35, was searching for music to play for her newborn son, Jason. Finding nothing she liked, she and her husband, David, 36, produced their own cassette with a variety of traditional lullabies such as “Rock-A-Bye-Baby,” with ballads they grew up listening to written by the Beatles and other artists. Selling for nearly $10, primarily in baby furniture stores, the cassette was a hit.

So with about $30,000, the couple started their own firm, called Discovery Music, a specialty music company that is becoming to infant music what the K-Tel label is to oldies and Windham Hill is to New Age music.

From their comfortable, white-fenced home in Sherman Oaks, the Wohlstadters have released five cassettes of music for infants since starting their company in October, 1985. They include two anthologies of lullabies, one tape of songs with morning themes such as “O, What a Beautiful Morning,” a cassette of silly songs and another tape of travel songs such as “Side by Side” to play in a car. Planned for release this year is a bathing cassette featuring “Splish Splash” and other songs.

Discovery Music is still in the infant stage itself--the Wohlstadters have only five employees--but the couple closely guard their sales figures, citing competitive reasons. The Wohlstadters say that sales jumped 85% in 1988 and that they sell tapes in about 5,000 stores. Music industry executives say the market for music aimed at children under age 3 probably has grown from virtually nothing five years ago to $5 million to $10 million today. Some believe that Discovery may have as much as half of that market.

As silly as it may seem to some, music for infants has become one of the hottest areas of children’s music, which overall is a nearly $200-million-a-year business. Nashville music producer J. Aaron Brown, who sells a Grammy-nominated recording of original lullabies written by his in-house songwriters, said he sold 300,000 cassettes last year. Most were sold in gift shops, he said, which sell the tapes for $12.95.

The business is starting to attract big-name companies, posing a threat to tiny Discovery. Walt Disney Records in Burbank earlier this year released “Disney’s Lullaby Favorites,” which includes a folk version of “When You Wish Upon a Star” sung by rocker Stephen Bishop, whose hits include “On and On” and “It Might Be You.”

Ellen Wohlstadter said she is nervous that large companies such as Disney are entering the market. “People say competition is good, but they have a lot of money behind them. They can do a lot of advertising and other things we can’t do at this point,” she said.

Other major record labels are also considering whether to produce lullaby tapes.

“We think it’s a very fertile market,” said Mark Jaffe, director of childrens marketing for A & M Records. Jaffe said A & M has yet to release a lullaby tape, mainly because it is searching for a singer the label believes can be marketed well.

Much of the lullaby cassettes’ success comes because the tapes aren’t sold so much for infants, who most likely are indifferent to the music they hear, as they are marketed to parents in their late 20s and 30s to listen to while trying to soothe crying babies or put them to bed.

That explains why one Discovery lullaby tape includes a cover version of Elvis Presley’s 1950s hit “Love Me Tender” on the same cassette with the traditional “German Lullaby.”

Nightly Music

Still, some parents believe that their babies enjoy the music. Rosine Hermodson-Olsen, a mother in Frederick, S.D., said she is a strong believer in playing music for infants and went so far as to play music for her 7-month-old son, Joseph, while he was still in the womb. She said she plays Discovery tapes for him almost every night.

“I play it if he’s a little antsy or if his teeth hurt. I think it relaxes him,” she said.

Pediatricians interviewed said they see no harm in playing music for infants, adding that it is unlikely that children will develop Pavlov-type conditioning in which they must hear music to fall asleep. Pediatricians said their main concern is that some parents might be tempted to use music too often as a convenient baby-sitter, depriving the child of important human contact.

“Music is all right, but it doesn’t replace people,” said Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a clinical professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and one of the nation’s leading child-care experts.

Part of the Discovery sales pitch is that music helps babies, although limited research has been done. One Discovery package says, “Research has proven parents who lullaby their babies promote bonding, infant development and speech.”

Question of Research

But Dr. Esther Wender, a pediatrician at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on early childhood, said she is unaware of any such research on the effect of lullabies.

“I don’t know of anybody who has studied it,” said Wender, who added that she doesn’t believe that listening to music would hurt a baby.

Ellen Wohlstadter said she informally gathered research on the subject. One Swedish study she said she found concluded that it was important to sing to a baby, even if it is off-key. A news article, she said, told of a Japanese study that showed that babies were soothed more by lullabies than rock ‘n’ roll. Despite the statements on the packages, she said, Discovery does not emphasize psychological benefits of the music in selling it. “We promote it more as entertainment,” she said.

Discovery is based in the downstairs part of the couple’s spacious home in the foothills. One room is an office, where orders are taken, publicity is planned and accounting work is done. The Wohlstadters, who share the title of president, also share an office in what used to be their bedroom, which has the guts of a new $40,000 computer in the closet. Discovery’s shipping department is in a guest house in the back yard.

TV Sports Producer

Ellen Wohlstadter formerly worked in production and distribution for RSO Records, the New York record label owned by Australian Robert Stigwood that scored one of the industry’s biggest hits in the late 1970s with the “Saturday Night Fever” movie sound track. David Wohlstadter is a television sports producer who does free-lance work on weekends for the ESPN sports channel.

To produce a cassette, the Wohlstadters select a theme, such as travel or lullabies, and listen to hundreds of songs. A royalty of 5.25% is paid to the songs’ owners. They also make frequent use of traditional songs in the public domain, which don’t require royalties.

Once songs are selected, singer Joanie Bartels, who was selected from a group of singers who auditioned for the job, records the songs, with cassettes duplicated at a plant owned by Warner Communications. Instrumental versions are usually recorded on the flip side of each cassette, with lyrics enclosed so parents can sing their own version of the songs.

Selecting songs can be a sensitive job. One parent wrote to criticize the use of the traditional “Rock-A-Bye-Baby” because, the parent said, the song is excessively violent. The reason was that the song contains the lines: “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.”

Another angry parent called Discovery at 9 p.m. a few weeks ago to complain about a 1986 tape that used a version of the Cat Stevens hit “Morning Has Broken.” The call came after the former pop singer, who has changed his name to Yusuf Islam and become a strict Muslim, endorsed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death threat against Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses.”

Rejecting Tunes

A large number of songs ultimately are rejected. For Discovery’s latest tape on silly songs, a popular children’s song called “Animal Fair” was nixed after it was recorded. The Wohlstadters were reluctant to issue the song because it refers to a monkey who gets drunk, sits on an elephant’s trunk and ends up flattened. But, they said, most songs are rejected because they have some kind of romantic lyrics that parents might find objectionable.

Part of the reason for Discovery’s growth isn’t so much the music as the Wohlstadters’ decision to initially sell the cassettes through distributors to children’s furniture stores and later to toy stores, children’s book stores, children’s clothing stores and department stores. The cassettes are usually hung on a stand that is placed on a store’s front counter.

Had they tried to sell the tapes to record stores, they said, the cassettes most likely would have been lost among popular adult albums more actively pushed by the record stores. Baby furniture stores made more sense.

New-Mother Market

“That’s where the mother goes when she is pregnant. The new mother is the market we wanted to get, and the new mother does not go into record stores,” Ellen Wohlstadter said.

Discovery Music is starting to feel growing pains. The Wohlstadters expect to have to move to proper offices next year. In addition, an $80,000 advertising campaign, their first, is being launched in magazines for new parents. And they are considering whether to expand into such areas as compact discs and videocassettes.

Still, she and others in the business believe that baby tapes won’t be a thirtysomething-type fad.

“People used to sing a lot to their children. People don’t have the time today and often don’t know the lyrics. You can say it’s a fad, but if it was, people wouldn’t be buying it as much as they are,” she said.