I haven’t listened to “oldies” radio in a long time. I have some questions about the kind of stuff they play nowadays.
When I was elementary school age( late 80’s- early 90’s), I loved listening to the oldies station. They played 40’s through 60’s music when I was really young, then bumped to 50’s through 70’s, probably around 1990.
I remember my oldies station had a few songs that weren’t really oldies in regular rotation. A few I remember for sure: Touch of Grey(the Dead), Kokomo(Beach Boys), and Sail Away(Enya)
I get the first two songs being played, because they were oldies bands, but Enya was a newish artist at the time. It was a good song, and I’m sure we were all glad they played it.
So, my question is, what are the new songs that are sneaking into the oldies stations today? However you define “new song” is fine with me.
Also, I had to Google “Oldies Station” to see if they were even still a thing before I bothered asking this question.
It seems like the majority of oldies stations are playing 60’s through 80’s hits.
This means oldies stations have only aged 10 years in the last 30 human years!
Shouldn’t we have a “New Oldies” station for 1990’s through 2010’s music? Do we have that, and it’s called something else?
I think most “classic rock” stations around here play 70’s to 90’s music (with a smattering of songs from the 60’s), whereas they used to play 60’s and 70’s music back in the 90’s (with a smattering of songs from the 50’s, maybe).
I don’t remember any radio stations playing music from the 40’s when I was a kid (maybe the occasional song on a country station?).
ISTM that on the infrequent occasion that I have heard “oldies” - generally in a place of business - that they remain stuck in the 60s-70s. My impression is that many streaming services segregate playlists by decade.
My dentist’s office plays a mix of 70s and more modern - leaning country. My office building’s lobby is stuck in the 70s - when I was a kid listening to top-40 radio. I generally feel as tho I am on “Name That Tune!”, as I can often identify the song - and remember all of the lyrics - upon hearing a single note/chord.
Here in Chicago in the 80s, the AM station WJJD would play stuff from around the '30s-'50s (all pre-rock-n-roll.) It wasn’t marketed as an oldies station, though. (Wikipedia tells me it was “adult standards” or “nostalgia” music.) Oldies started with the birth of rock and roll. WJJD’s FM sister station was the oldies station, WJMK. The started out playing early rock and roll – the Platters and Bill Haley and the Comets is as early as I remember – through the 60s, then later on went very easy on all the early rock stuff and concentrated from around 1962/1963 to the early 70s. In the early 2000s, they experimented with adding 80s music to the playlist, but ended up reverting to a 60s-70s timeframe.
That station doesn’t exist anymore, and I don’t know if there is an equivalent oldies format station that has taken its place. WLS-FM is a “classic hits” station, with a playlist of late 60s to early 00s. TImewise, that would be roughly equivalent to an oldies station back in the 80s-90s, in that the latest music is about 20 years old, but while it spans a longer timeframe, it ignores early rock music.
It seems to me the oldies moniker is specific to those early rock years: the 50s, 60s, and early-to-mid 70s, centered on the 60s, post about 1962. General music that is at least 20 years old and centers on the late 70s or 80s is called “classic hits” these days.
In the Chicago market, WSHE-FM focuses on hits from the 90s to 10s. Looking at the current playlist, it’s stuff like Matchbox 20, Timbaland, Brittney Spears, The Cardigans, The Cure, TLC, Kings of Leon, that sort of stuff. I can’t find anywhere a specific name for this radio format. I’m guessing it’s a sub-genre of “classic hits.”
Chicago also has 87.7 MeTV-FM that is closer to the “oldies of old” than WLS or WSHE. They mainly focus on 1960s and 1970s songs. Their core artists seem to be Carole King, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Billy Joel, and the like, with some Motown and British Invasion songs as well. (I could definitely do without the James Taylor stuff.)
I know in Sirius they have every conceivable niche identified and cordoned off, with no discernible “bleed.” The classic rock stations I listen to when flipping on terrestrial radio seem to have a moving 30-year window that they play, with the end date about 20 years ago from current. So when I was younger, early Beatles would get a lot of airplay, for example, then only later Beatles.
Come to think of it, the Beatles with their indefinite shelf life, may not be the best gauge.
Oldies have now been replaced by “Classic Hits” which Wikipedia defines as
a radio format which generally includes songs from the top 40 music charts from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, with music from the 1980s serving as the core of the format. Music that was popularized by MTV in the early 1980s and the nostalgia behind it is a major driver to the format. It is considered the successor to the oldies format, a collection of top 40 songs from the late 1950s through the late 1970s that was once extremely popular in the United States and Canada
We had a “real” oldies station (50s and 60s) here for a few years before the owner got in trouble with the law. Now the iHeart Radio oldies station is mostly 80s with a very few 70s songs mixed in.
Of course it all comes down to money. Over on the radio forum I frequent there are constant threads about why advertisers don’t want listeners past age 50 or so (which is the prime audience for oldies stations.) The answer is that once we get past about 50, we’re done with buying stuff, and despite what you see about all those rich older retirees, the median household income for those 65+ is a full 1/3 lower than the average household income, which means there are a few people who are doing very well, and a bunch who aren’t.
Hey, OP, you do realize that few people younger than us are listening to “the radio”, right?
Even in the car, my kids (and even my wife) are listening to Spotify playlists or Soundcloud. None of us need to pay for Sirius, but there are lots of people doing that, too.
So when I read the title of the thread, I translated it as
“A question for folks who listen to an Oldies Playlist”.
But the answer’s close to the same: “Classic Rock” now includes a mish-mash of decades, music styles…
… AND level of quality. I always ask “If they’re playing '70s music, does no one weed out the crappy songs?” I mean, thanks for the Led Zeppelin, but you followed it with “Feeeelings…”.
(Then Van Halen, seguing into The Captain and Tennille… then I turned it off.)
The NY Oldies station, CBS 101, plays mostly 70s through late 80s, early 90s, which makes sense – in the 80s, they played 40s-60s. For the real oldies experience, there is an HD radio station that’s Golden Oldies, which would have been what oldies stations were playing when I was listening to New Wave.
CBS 101 plays things that seem shockingly recent to me, but it turns out are 40 years old.
When I had first moved to Dallas in 1988, 98.7 K-Luv played music from the late 1950s through the very early 1970s with a few outliers in either direction from time-to-time. By the mid 1990s, you no longer heard “Chantilly Lace” by the Big Bopper and you started hearing songs from late in the 1970s.
In 2005 I was driving to Dallas to visit some friends and turned the dial to K-Luv. I listened to a few songs without thinking about it when Guns n’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” started playing. I thought for sure this couldn’t be an oldie but when I did the math and figured out it was 18 years old at that point.
Now KLUV doesn’t even exist at this point. I think it’s a sports show now. I wonder whatever happend to radio personality Debbie Diaz?
I’ve always looked at “oldies” as being just another era in music history, like the Romantic Era, or the Baroque Period, or the Swing Era. Thus, when the Big Bopper recorded Chantilly Lace, that song was a brand new oldie.
The Oldies Era began when American Bandstand first aired, and ended when the boys weren’t required to wear ties on camera.
I listen to a oldies pop music station… run by a local school district. No really hard rock, mostly 70s and 80s, but as recent as Santana’s 1999 album. And mostly well known songs, but not just the ones that have been played every month since they acquired oldies status. Right now they’re playing Christopher Cross. They surprise me sometimes.
And all the school kids run the station during the day. It’s nice to hear voices that haven’t been groomed into midwest standard yet.
Thanks all for setting me straight on “Classic Hits”.
It makes sense now.
So, can anyone tell me if any relatively new songs are sneaking into the Classic Hits stations?
Like, if Usher just came out with a new song, would it play on Classic Hits?
Thanks, it was Orinoco Flow I was thinking of. I should have looked that up.
The oldies station was the only station I could sleep to when I was a kid. The other stations I liked would have interruptions of news, talk, or change of format through the night. The interruptions disturbed my sleep, so oldies it was. I remember drifting off to that nice hypnotic “Sail away”.
