About two years ago, Ryan Ruden — father of two and head of touring and events at Columbia Records — had a realization: His young children, now ages 4 and 7, didn’t yet know how to read, but they did know how to request their favorite music (including Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”) on voice-activation devices like Amazon’s Alexa.
Soon after, he met with Sony’s global business development team and asked it to pull the numbers on voice activation’s top requests.The data strongly supported his hunch that kids are increasingly using these devices — on Alexa, the Moana and Frozen soundtracks, and of course the force that is “Baby Shark,” helped make kids’ music one of the most requested genres — and gave him an idea: He could harness the power of.