It’s a TV plot twist, it’s a tour

Reality TV?

Been there, done that.

TV series-generated soundtrack albums?

They’re like, so 15 minutes ago.

How about a TV show-spawned concert tour in which life imitates art imitates life?

That’s so now.

Beginning Feb. 28, a monthlong concert tour growing out of the WB Network’s youth-driven “One Tree Hill” series will feature not only musicians whose songs have been featured on the show but also appearances by some cast members. The 23-city journey begins in Vancouver, Canada, and reaches Los Angeles on March 9 at the Wiltern LG.

It is believed to be the first time a group of musicians have gone out on tour under the imprint of a dramatic TV series, and it’s the brainchild of “One Tree Hill” creator Mark Schwahn, series co-producer Joe Davola and Maverick Records marketing director David Grant.

The endeavor takes the synergy between television and the music industry to a new level, one that has insiders in both fields watching with great curiosity. If it works, and so far tickets for the concerts have been selling briskly, it may provide a blueprint for others interested in exploiting the combined drawing power of TV and pop music.

Michelle Branch is the biggest name on the tour, though she’s appearing with fellow singer-songwriter Jessica Harp in a new side project called the Wreckers. The pair performed and had minor acting roles as themselves in a recent episode of “One Tree Hill,” and they have an album due in June.

Gavin DeGraw, whose “I Don’t Wanna Be” was chosen by Schwahn and Davola as the series’ theme song, will join the tour in seven cities, including Los Angeles.

Where reality and fiction really start to meld is with the teaming of singer-songwriter Tyler Hilton and “One Tree Hill” costar Bethany Joy Lenz.

Hilton, who has been working to carve out a music career for seven years, landed a recurring role on the series as Chris Keller, an aspiring singer-songwriter. Lenz’s character on the show, Haley, is a young woman with stifled dreams of making it in music, and on last week’s season finale she decided to leave her husband and go on tour with ... Keller and the Wreckers.

And as it happens, Lenz also has real-life musical aspirations.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the tour is that the performers are emerging acts rather than established hit-makers, with the exception of Branch. But even her name isn’t being exploited for marquee value. It’s the Wreckers, not Branch, whose name is on the lineup.

“Television has become the new radio,” says Davola, who spent a decade creating original programming for MTV. “I know how tight MTV’s playlist was. Nobody is taking a chance on new music. But that’s all we do. We’re not slaves to any playlist, and we don’t let record companies tell us what their priorities are.”

Like many other youth-targeted TV shows, “One Tree Hill” has released a soundtrack album, and it includes songs from DeGraw, Hilton, the Get Up Kids, Jimmy Eat World, Story of the Year, Keane and other buzz-worthy young acts that appeal to the show’s target audience: teen girls. It also includes a Hilton-Lenz duet that provided one of the plot’s turning points.

Execs at Maverick Records, who have been closely involved in the show’s merging of music and story line, are equally excited about the ways that TV can help them in breaking out new artists.

“The way we market music today, radio is almost the last place we go,” says Grant at Maverick, home of both Hilton and the Wreckers. “You need to develop a story and an identity for an artist, otherwise it’s just another song on the radio. Once you can establish an artist’s identity, people will buy into who they are as musicians and artists first. It’s a huge tool.”

Adds Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the concert-industry tracking magazine, “I think we’ll end up seeing more efforts like this as people try to find new ways of reaching audiences with music.... It’s the one time when TV probably makes sense for marketing, when it’s as tightly targeted as this show is.”

A question some of the musicians have wrestled with is whether the connection with the show will help or hurt their primary careers in the long run.

“I was worried about that after I did the first couple of shows,” Hilton said in an interview from Spokane, Wash., where he made a radio promotion tour stop this week.

“The worst case scenario was that people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re that guy from TV,’ ” says Hilton. “Then all I’ve done in these last seven years as a musician would not mean much of anything. That would be a bummer.”

Hilton, whose 2000 indie debut album was reissued by Maverick upon his signing the next year, and whose formal Maverick debut, “The Tracks of ... ,” came out in September, said he initially got some negative feedback because the Chris Keller character he plays is a self-aggrandizing egomaniac. “I got a lot of e-mails from people saying, ‘I didn’t want to come out to your show because I thought you were such a jerk.’ ”

“Some people thought it wasn’t me singing. But that was just in the very, very beginning. Now I’m so impressed; I hardly ever hear ‘You’re Tyler from “One Tree Hill.” ’ Now the audience gets it.”

Keith Sarkisian, vice president of contemporary music for the William Morris Agency, which is booking the “One Tree Hill” tour, says the crisscrossing of fact and fiction is an intriguing experiment.

Several shows, mostly in 1,000- to 1,500-seat theaters, have sold out quickly. “I don’t know if the response would be the same if the show wasn’t working the story line into the tour. But I have to imagine it would be. The show has a pretty active demographic.”

Schwahn and Davola point out that, rather than artificially grafting the idea of the Haley character joining the Wreckers-Keller tour onto the plot, it’s been a natural extension of the show’s story arc.

In that respect, it’s no slam dunk whether a successful “One Tree Hill” tour might serve as a template for other record companies or TV producers looking to goose their sales or ratings by actively combining the two.

“All of us [in television] are telling the oldest stories in the world with our shows,” Schwahn says. “The challenge is to be contemporary. We try to go left if people anticipate that we’re going right. Joe and I felt this was something they hadn’t seen before, but it was true to the show at the same time.... When you can combine those two things -- when it feels right for your show and it’s contemporary and novel -- it’s a win-win.”

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‘One Tree Hill’ Tour

Where: The Wiltern LG, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. March 9

Price: $28.50

Info: (213) 380-5005