In the early years of the twentyfirst century the US music industry created a new market for tweens selling music that was cooler than Barney but that still felt safe for children. In Tween Pop Tyler Bickford traces the dramatic rise of the tween music industry showing how it marshaled childishness as a key element in legitimizing childrens participation in public culture. The industry played on longstanding gendered and racialized constructions of childhood as feminine and whiteboth central markers of innocence and childishness. In addition to Kidz Bop High School Musical and the Disney Channels music programs Bickford examines Taylor Swift in relation to girlhood and whiteness Justin Biebers childish immaturity and Miley CyrusHannah Montana and postfeminist discourses of worklife balance. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to be marketed to Bickford demonstrates the importance of childrens music to core questions of identity politics consumer culture and the public sphere.