At the Jonas Brothers` family home in New Jersey, a wooden sign over the bathroom door reads "Patience is a virtue." It`s a lesson the Brothers are lucky to have learned. Though the pop-punk boy band is riding high at iTunes and Radio Disney on the strength of "Year 3000," the Brothers have taken an unexpectedly circuitous route to success.

The Jonas Brothers - Nick, 14, Joe, 17, and Kevin, 19 - were born as a band in 2005, when incoming Columbia Records president Steve Greenberg was handed a stack of CDs by Columbia artists with whom he wasn`t familiar. Included was a solo disc by Nick, a former Broadway baby with 'Les Miserables' and 'Beauty and the Beast' on his resume.

"I didn`t like the record he`d made," Greenberg says. "But his voice stuck out, so I met with him and found out he had two brothers." This was familiar territory for Greenberg - he`s the guy who discovered Hanson. "I liked the idea of putting together this little garage-rock band and making a record that nodded to the Ramones and `70s punk. So Michael Mangini and I went into the studio with the Jonas Brothers and did it."

Lead single "Mandy" performed well at "TRL," advance CDs were sent to the media and the Jonases hit the road, playing shows with Jesse McCartney and the Veronicas. Yet the band`s album wasn`t appearing in stores. "Over the course of our time with Sony, we probably had 10 release dates," says the band`s manager, Phil McIntyre, who credits the delay to several high-level executive changes at Sony (including Greenberg`s departure) and the decision - "reached by both label and management," McIntyre says - to "go back and put together a couple more tracks. The original version felt like a really great album, but we just thought we could use another lead single."

They found one in "Year 3000," a tune by the English pop-punk act Busted,which had a hit with the song in 2002 in the United Kingdom. "It was cool," Nick says of reworking the album. "We`re good friends with [Busted frontman] James [Bourne], so we were honored to do the song."

'It`s About Time,' the Brothers` Columbia debut, finally hit record stores last August in what McIntyre calls a "limited release" of 50,000 CDs; so far, according to Neilsen SoundScan, the album has sold 40,000 copies. "That was disappointing," the manager admits. "We`d never gone to top 40, and Sony never put together a proper radio plan. Steve Greenberg did an amazing job of imagining a fan base at a grass-roots level, but we were missing that key exposure."

In October, McIntyre says, he and the Jonases began discussing leaving Sony. "It was important to find out what their game plan was before we did anything," McIntyre says. "We had a very frank meeting with them in which they said they were not ready to go to the next level of setting up the project."

By that point, "Year 3000" had already become a hit at Radio Disney, whose vice president of programming Robin Jones says the Jonas Brothers filled her need for a "clean Green Day." So one of McIntyre`s first calls was to Hollywood Records. "Disney came into the picture because Disney was always in the picture," McIntyre says, citing the band`s appearance on last year`s 'Little Mermaid' and 'Disneymania 4' albums.

"It was important to us that the label guys get the band," Nick says. "Which the people at Hollywood did," Joe adds. "They`d seen us at shows because we`d been on their Jesse McCartney tour."

Like Jones at Radio Disney, Hollywood GM Abbey Konowitch says the Jonases filled a hole at his label. "We`ve been incredibly successful in the teen-pop field," he says, "but we`ve been looking for a boy band. And here was one that was already developed." Konowitch says the plan for the Jonases - who are at work on an album of new material with producer John Fields, tentatively set for release in August - is the same as with all the label`s teen-pop acts - work the Disney demographic first then move into top 40. "It`s what we did with Aly & AJ," Konowitch says.

So far, the plan is paying off: Since the "Year 3000" video debuted on the Disney Channel in mid-January, the single`s digital downloads have increased dramatically, peaking at 36,000 during the week ended Feb. 4. (Last week, Sony pulled all its Jonas material - including "Year 3000" - from iTunes, which McIntyre admits will stall the band`s progress until Hollywood acquires the band`s masters.)

"Hopefully Disney takes them down the same road I did," Greenberg says. "The guys are so good at what they do that it`s going to work if they`re allowed to pursue their own vision. The smartest thing a label can do is not mess with them."

Taken from M&C