This month has brought several big announcements in the kid’s podcast realm and the latest will see Christina Sanabria and Andrés Salguero, the Latin Grammy Award-winning kids’ music duo known as 123 Andrés, make the leap into the format. They are teaming up with public media to create a new series called Jamming on the Job, that will feature Sanabria and Salguero touring the U.S. with a music-heavy show that will open young listeners’ ears to potential careers open to them.
The show – produced by PBS KIDS, PBS North Carolina, and PRX – will feature Sanabria and Salguero performing songs about the “world of work.” At each tour stop, they meet a grownup with an interesting job who helps them solve a problem. As the duo learns about the “career-of-the-day” and the skills needed to be successful in that job, they then write a brand new song about it with help from their magic music-making machine: BoomBox, voiced by Grammy-nominated musician Pierce Freelon. Featured jobs include a nurse practitioner, prescribed fire manager, language instructor, and robotics engineer.
In addition to giving kids a window into a wide variety of career paths, the creators say each episode of the new series highlights foundational skills relevant to each job such as empathy, social problem-solving, and responsibility, as well as flexible thinking, impulse control, and persistence. It debuts Sept. 14.
Jamming on the Job is part of a new season of shows from PBS Kids which will also release a third season of The Arthur Podcast tied to the long-running television animated series on Nov. 9. The Arthur Podcast is currently the biggest podcast for PBS Kids with nearly five million streams and 1.3 million downloads across all apps so far in 2023.
And on January 4, 2024, PBS Kids will debut the Playdate with the Wombats podcast tied to the TV series “Work It Out Wombats!” Like the series and digital games, the new podcast, produced by GBH Kids and Cultural Whisperers, reinforces computational thinking skills and encourages listeners to put them to use by identifying and copying patterns and connecting the cause to the effect.
“We’re so excited to introduce kids to fresh, fun podcasts that we hope will get the whole family listening, learning, and enjoying these audio adventures together,” said Sara DeWitt, Senior VP/General Manager, PBS Kids. “These podcasts will give kids opportunities to further connect with characters from some of their favorite shows in unique, new ways,” she said in a statement. Additional podcasts are slated to roll out throughout 2024.
Showing that kids are a growing podcast listening segment, PBS Kids says its portfolio of kid-targeted podcasts have had 77 million streams and 10 million downloads to date. In addition to The Arthur Podcast, another big hit for the public broadcaster has been Keyshawn Solves It. The show, produced by GBH Kids and PRX, had nearly 2.2 million cross-platform streams and 30,000 downloads in its first four weeks.
Also this month, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it is bringing its iconic brand to podcast to develop a slate of kid-targeted podcasts for Wondery’s Kids & Family division. And Audacy announced it has teamed up with brothers Sergey and Victoria Vashketov, who have become YouTube stars with their preschooler-focused “Vlad & Niki” YouTube content, to launch the Vlad & Niki Podcast Adventures podcast series.