OOKOUT, Pa., Aug. 5 — For many summers the children at Liberty Lake Day Camp have been playing on the fields, swimming in the lake and soaking up summer traditions like color war, canoeing and chocolate pudding tug-o-war. Only recently has a new activity been added to the list: the rock concert.

It's Lollapalooza for the lollipop set. Some of the music industry's most promising — or possibly most promising — pop stars are heading to camp in an effort to reach a captive audience of taste-making tenny-boppers, teens and tweens.

For the past few summers, some of tomorrow's rock stars have been traveling to dozens of the finest day and overnight camps from Pennsylvania to Maine, performing concerts that are either sponsored by their record labels or part of Camplified, a concert tour intended exclusively for camps.

It was the Camplified tour that rolled into Liberty Lake this week on its 15th and final stop of the summer.

The artists give live concerts, hold autograph sessions and sometimes participate in activities with the campers, all part of carefully orchestrated marketing campaigns to break through as the next Britney Spears or Backstreet Boy, or even Fefe Dobson, who was just on MTV's "Total Request Live" but only last year was headlining the Camplified show.

"It's strange playing a random club in Philly for a bunch of drunks and then the next day playing for a bunch of 8-year-olds," said Randy Wooten of the Bloody Lovelies, a California rock band that headlined this summer's Camplified tour. Still, Mr. Wooten described the concerts as a success. Not only did the younger campers "really dig" the music, he said, but the band cultivated an older fan base of counselors as it geared up for the college circuit — and sold hundreds of CD's and T-shirts along the way.

Despite its commercial overtones, the Camplified concert has become a highly anticipated event at many camps where "Kumbaya" is more commonly found on the singalong set list. "We have another singer that comes in and does shows with a guitar around a campfire," said Andy Pritikin, Liberty Lake owner/director (and former rock musician himself). While that is a tradition, he noted, "it's not a rock concert."

The show on Liberty Lake's soccer field, however, was. Huckapoo, an energetic group of 14-year-old Spice Girl types with two songs on Disney Channel soundtracks, was the clear crowd favorite.  The Bloody Lovelies gave a solid performance. As one savvy 12-year-old camper put it, Camplified was a "cool concept."

Even in an age of "American Idol" and digital downloading, many music industry insiders consider these concerts to be one of the most effective ways of introducing artists to youngsters who are not old enough to enter clubs and who must depend on Mom to drive them to shows. Midas Records, an independent label, has sent its most promising pop princess, Angel Faith, 16, to about 60 camps, where she sings four songs and signs autographs to promote her coming album before moving on in a Barbie-pink tour bus.

For each of the past two summers, the Camplified tour has played about 15 camps, reaching more than 10,000 generally affluent campers ages 8 to 16, as well as about 6,000 of their college-age counselors.

"We knew our audience was going to be a younger demographic," explained Lisette Rioux, director of artist development for Island Def Jam Records, who said Camplified helped jump-start a word-of-mouth marketing campaign for Fefe Dobson. "This was the perfect way to get started."

After Ms. Dobson "met the kids at camp and did the activities with them, they just thought they owned her and were the first ones to discover her," Ms. Rioux said. And when the campers returned home and began to hear the songs on the radio, Ms. Rioux added, Ms. Dobson's strongest markets were the major feeder cities to the camps along the tour route.

Brian Lukow, Huckapoo's manager, said he believed that the tour might help his girls follow a similar trajectory. "For me Camplified was about the captive audience," he said. "Nobody knows my kids yet. Nobody knows their music. But the great thing is that after they see the show, the kids who go to camp scatter back to different schools" and spread the word. Other groups, like the the Bloody Lovelies, used the Camplified tour to collect e-mail addresses from campers and staff members; now the band can notify them when its new album arrives or when it perform in their hometowns.

Meanwhile the artists, whose labels pay for them to participate in Camplified, get live performance experience in what is essentially a dress rehearsal for a major tour. The Huckapoo girls said the Camplified tour taught them to handle everything from the daily grind of traveling to marriage proposals from teenage boys — not to mention the autograph-seeking swarms. "We have signed everything — shoes, hats, posters, stomachs," said Jordan Price, who goes by the name Groovy Tuesday in the group.

Skye Sweetnam, a 16-year-old rocker who swung through more than a dozen camps in the Poconos last year before opening for Britney Spears this spring, called the Camplified experience "her favorite tour to date" because of the excitement of playing in front of 500 screaming youngsters. "Every person in camp knows your name and your songs," she said.

Of course that was no accident. In the weeks before the show Ms. Sweetnam's music was played at socials and blasted over the camp loudspeakers before morning announcements, thanks to the CD's and other materials that Camplified's promoters sent in advance.

While a rock concert may be a less traditional camp activity than a game of capture the flag, the camps — which pay several thousand dollars to have the Camplified tour visit — contend that it is still an "exploratory" and "discovery-oriented experience." The shows, they say, offer campers the chance to see up-and-coming artists before they become stars — and what is for many youngsters their very first rock concert.

"To them it was Woodstock, I swear, except there were teenyboppers on the stage," said Andy Pritikin, the director of Liberty Lake Day Camp in Mansfield Township, N.J., which had a Camplified show this summer for 500 campers.

Still, many camp directors remain skeptical. Mr. Pritikin said he asked more than 15 other camps in the area to join him in bringing in the Camplified tour but could find only one other director willing to go along.

Aimee Berger and Carl Freed, two music industry veterans who pioneered the Camplified concept, say that to ensure that the concert is age-appropriate and safe, they hold regular meetings with camp directors.

And they not only screen all the acts but also make the artists agree to a four-page production manual with atypical touring rules. "If you are a smoker," Ms. Berger said, "you'll get over your habit for the day." And provocative outfits are pretty much out. "I want the artists to be cute and dress cute," she said.

Then there is the rule Ms. Berger personally imposed: these future rock stars must act like campers for the day so they can relate to their audience — even if it means stomaching camp food.

"Unless you are an American Idol who got to be on a media blitz television show," she said, "you'd better be willing to sit down and drink some bug juice."