Kids' Best Happy Birthday Party iMix

This post will be of interest to anyone planning a kids' birthday celebration, as well as to anyone looking for ways of promoting their own music on iTunes.

The other day I was looking at my digital download stats from CDBaby.com, and I noticed that my most popular digital song BY FAR is "Birthday Boogaloo." This stands to reason, since people like to send songs as birthday greetings. And it got me thinking about how I might capitalize on this phenomenon...

An iMix is a list of songs on iTunes. Anyone can post an iMix. (It's easy - just make a playlist, select it, click on the arrow, and follow the instructions that come up.) Most iMixes are just lists people share that mean something to them personally. You can purchase an entire iMix with one click, just like purchasing an album. (Although you don't get the volume discount.) Whenever you look at a song or an artist in iTunes, you also see a list of related iMixes, so it makes a good browsing feature.

Naturally I thought, how about an iMix of birthday songs? Many exist already, but none of the ones I found seemed very purposeful. So Lisa and I did an iTunes search on the word "Birthday" and Lisa went through the hundreds of songs that turned up and pulled out ones that seemed usable for kids. We purchased a bunch of them and narrowed the list even further.

We put some of the best songs (including my own by default) into a 20 minute iMix. The description on the iMix page tells more:

"Here are 20 minutes of fantastic birthday songs for kids age 1-8. Use this iMix as the perfect soundtrack for cake and ice cream at a child's birthday party. Play it as a surprise celebration first thing in the morning, groove to it on the way to school, or use it to jazz up a classroom birthday celebration. We scoured through hundreds of birthday songs on iTunes, selecting only those that speak directly to a child on his or her birthday. We purchased music, listened in different combinations, and narrowed our initial list down from 90 to 20 minutes of the best of the best. The songs are energetic, positive, fun, joyful, and bear repeated listening even by adult standards. This iMix will help make any child's birthday all the more special. Brought to you proudly by MontyHarper.com."

If you have iTunes, click here to check it out!