The Jonas Brothers are no strangers to Rhode Island. The New Jersey-based group opened for Miley Cyrus on her recent Hannah Montana tour stop in Providence, but Nicholas, Joe and Kevin have passed this way before, including gigs at The Living Room and Lupo’s. Joe, above, and his brothers drew a crowd at the Emerald Square Mall in August 2006.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

LOS ANGELES Most young men can be forgiven for not knowing what they’ll be doing two days from now, much less two years. Not the three siblings who make up the hit trio the Jonas Brothers. The superstars-in-the-making have every day mapped out for the next 24 months.

If you’re not a tween/teenage girl or don’t live in proximity to one, you may not yet be in on the phenomenon created by 20-year-old Kevin, 18-year-old Joe and 15-year-old Nick. They opened for Miley Cyrus on her fall Hannah Montana tour to the delight of shrieking girls everywhere. Their song “S.O.S.” catapulted to No. 1 on iTunes. Their second album has sold more than 900,000 copies. And that’s just the beginning.

Earlier this month, the band became the youngest act to sign a deal with concert presenter Live Nation. The multimillion dollar, two-year pact includes promoting 140 shows in theaters and arenas worldwide by the New Jersey-based brothers.

“We know where we’re going to be at the end of 2009,” says Joe, incredulously.

While some may consider putting such big money behind a still-developing act risky, Billboard’s Ray Waddell calls it a smart move: “The Jonas Brothers are about as safe a bet as exists in the music business today,” he says. “This is a Super Bowl year for them.”

All this success comes after the band got off to a rocky start. Its debut album came out on Columbia in 2006 to little fanfare because their primary champion, Columbia president Steve Greenberg, had departed the label by the time it was released. The band soon parted ways with Columbia and signed with its current home, Hollywood Records. (The album, It’s About Time, is now a collector’s item with an asking price of up to $299 on Amazon.com.)

The comparisons with Hanson are inevitable: like Hanson, these three brothers write their own songs and play their own instruments, giving them more credibility than the average boy band. (The Jonas Brothers even name check Hanson in their song “That’s Just the Way We Roll.”)

The tour is the first step toward the global domination that Hollywood Records’ parent, The Walt Disney Co., has provided in the past for such acts as Hilary Duff, Cyrus and the cast of High School Musical. Though mainstream radio has been largely resistant to these acts, there are signs that the Jonas Brothers will break through with new single “When You Look Me in the Eyes.”

“The only way to get onto pop radio is to make records with broad appeal. They have begun to do that,” Greenberg says. “This is different from being big in Disney’s proprietary media, where super-serving the core young audience is all that matters.”

Not that the Disney juggernaut will stop anytime soon. In mid-June comes Camp Rock, a Disney Channel movie that the network hopes will be the next High School Musical. The next month, the band is due to release its third album: Joe says the topics are “girls, missing a girl on the road or liking someone or having fun on tour.” Musically, Nick adds, “it’s got more Elvis Costello-, Prince-type influences.”

The Disney assault continues with the brothers’ own TV show, the taping of which has been temporarily thwarted by the writer’s strike but is likely to start in the fall. The series revolves around the boys as spies, whose cover is they are also in a struggling rock group.

“It’s about (being) a high school student who can’t make your five o’clock job because you have band rehearsal and you have to save the world,” Joe says.

But first comes the tour. From the Cyrus outing, they learned how to captivate a large audience, but their lessons weren’t confined to the stage. When tickets for their tour went on sale, they decided that the first 20 rows would only be sold at the box office of the venue through a lottery system and not online.

“We wanted our real fans to be right up front so we can play and have the energy from them rather than having some really rich cats sit(ting) down,” Joe says.

Life on tour is good for the trio, with one minor complaint: “We drive all night to get to where we’re going, so we have to get out of our bus and into the hotel room,” Kevin says. “Sometimes people are outside your hotel at 4 a.m. and you just woke up and you’re a little discombobulated, but we still try to have as much fun as we should.”