I’m watching Selena and an interesting observation popped into my head. In the film a young Selena in 1981 is shown singing songs by Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. That makes the songs she was singing about 23 years old at that time. I was born in 1977, but my recollection of the 80s is that Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens sang oldies, even though the music was only 25 to 30 years old by the late 80s. I don’t really notice the same difference in music that is currently 25 to 30 years old. Music from the early 90s doesn’t feel like “oldies.” Is this just a perception because I was around for the 80s and 90s and not the 50s and 60s, or can it be objectively claimed that music is no longer changing as rapidly now as it did between the late 50s and early 80s?
I’ll add this observation as well. I’m watching with my family and my 15 year old daughter claims that Selena’s music doesn’t qualify as the oldies despite being over 20 years old.
I don’t think mainstream pop music has changed much since the early 90’s either and I don’t think it is just me (or you). I listen to the 90’s station on Sirius XM all the time and my daughters can’t even tell it is not current. I forget sometimes myself especially when they play a song I am not familiar with.
OTOH, the 80’s and 70’s stations are both nostalgic and very dated. It is blatantly obvious when I switch to one of those by choice or mistake.
I can’t see calling the vast majority of 90’s music ‘oldies’ at this point even though it may be technically old enough to qualify. I think it is better to look at it in terms of musical eras instead of years. The era that started in the early 90’s still hasn’t ended.
For me, it seems that what I am comfortable calling an “oldie” as well as “classic rock” has advanced around one year for every year I’ve been exposed to the term. In the early 80s my mom started listening to oldies and they never played stuff from the late 60s – it was weird, just a couple years before that, some stations played late Beatles stuff like it had just been released, but since the later stuff was not old enough to be an “oldie” the oldies stations didn’t play them at first.
But I definitely don’t think that mid-90s stuff is “oldies” now. The late 90s was when I first noticed the rift between what “oldies” stations played and how I classified them when stations would dip into late 70s stuff on occasion. Back then, applying the “2 years for every 1 year” rule, only stuff from the very early 70s sounded like oldies to me, not late 70s. By the mid-2000s, mid-70s stuff seemed appropriate. And now, early 80s stuff does not seem weird to be on an oldies station.
The same rule applies to classic rock, but add 10 years. So early-to-mid 1990s stuff does not seem weird to be on a classic rock station, but would seem weird to be on an oldies station.
Yep. When I was a kid, Happy Days, set in the late 50’s or about 15 years prior, seemed forever ago. Now Nirvana and Zep and Michael Jackson all seem contemporary in how they are regarded.
well sfter not hearing LA’s famous k-earth 101 for a couple of years I was shocked to hear mostly 80s pop…it was mostly 50s-70s before
I think it qualifies when it becomes 30 years old if its in their format las other oldies station is rock
but in my town theres an “old school” station that plays nothing but 70s- to late 90s rap and r&B …the girls next door are surprised when I know kool mo dee lyrics …and such when they the station…
I’m with your daughter, it’s definitely not oldies. Even calling 80s music oldies is pushing it.
Well, back in the 60s, an oldie was a song that was not currently on the top 40 list. If it was a hit a year ago, then it was an oldie.
Songs from the 50s were not played on top 40 stations in the 60s, except maybe on late night or Sunday night shows where the audience was small If you heard them at all, it as in various compilation albums like the Cruisin’ Series.
It was in the 70s when oldies became an actual radio format, and they were playing songs from the 60s (mainly) with some from the 50s. The term seems to have stuck to that particular era.
I think a lot of it is that lots of the songs from the 70s never went away. When oldies radio came to my area in the late 80s, songs from acts like Chuck Berry and the Everly Brothers hadn’t been heard on the radio in ages. In contrast, in the past few decades songs like “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Don’t Stop Believing” have been on the radio somewhere nonstop. It’s not that music hasn’t changed in the past 30 years; Journey sounds nothing like 21 Pilots or Disturbed.
Exactly, and the fact that was the last era non-punk white acts dominated the charts is not a coincidence.
Also true.
Back when I was young, in the 1990s, it was fairly simple: Oldies began in the 1950s and included such acts as Chuck Berry, Dion and the Belmonts, and Elvis, and was about fast cars, dead teenagers, and hops, whatever the Hell those were. It was noticeably different from Classic Rock, which began with the Beatles, included more (implied) drugs and (overt) politics, and ended at some point in the latter 1970s. Eighties music was rare; you only heard it on special shows on the CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio; Top 40 with a broader playlist) stations, or in stores sometimes. Absolutely nobody played anything prior to “Rock Around The Clock”, Year Zero for Oldies and, therefore, the music that mattered.
These days, the old definition of Oldies has mostly dropped off terrestrial radio. It’s outright hard to find an FM station that plays much prior to the 1970s, even; there’s a single station in Missoula, 106.3 KMSO, which plays mostly 1960s stuff, and advertises itself as “Boomer Radio”*. The 1950s have dropped off the air entirely, or close to it. Classic Rock, meanwhile, includes Nirvana and Pearl Jam and the rest of the grunge world, as that’s white enough and non-punk enough to appeal to that market.
*(They also advertise themselves as playing a Beatles song every hour, and if that ain’t the most Boomer thing imaginable I don’t know what is.)
I felt like this is similar to “classical music” – which people use all the time as a synonym for instrumental, orchestral music regardless of when that music is from. But it’s more useful when it refers to the actual classical period. People will never stop using it colloquially, though. I realize that ship has sailed.
I think Oldies is a specific genre based on a fairly definable time period. Obviously, it’s not ironclad, but it’s perfectly reasonable as a general description of a kind of music. They need to come up with another descriptor for other pop music that is merely “old.” I get that 80s music is old, but it’s not Oldies.
Yeah, “Oldies” for me is an actual period in the 50s and 60s rather than a term for “old music”. I get that it’s been bastardized, not the least by radio stations trying to expand their play lists, but I still reserve it for that Early Rock, Motown & related period. then you’ve got your “classic rock” of the late 60s through maybe very early 80s (mainly for legacy 60/70s acts) and then it’s just “80s stuff”, “90s stuff”, etc. Not everything needs a cute phrase-name.
I remember c1966 that songs from even 1962 were called “golden oldies” by DJs. Back then it didn’t take long at all for a song to become an oldie.
Somehow we got stuck for the longest time with “oldies” meaning 60s and early 70s. (Forgetting the 50s for the most part and earlier stuff altogether.)
But now the label is getting unstuck. Our main local oldie station now does stuff from the 80s. And other broader stations do 90s music as part of their oldie sets.
Call Me Maybe: that’s not just an oldie, it’s a golden oldie, right?
I think “classic rock” is the new “oldies”. It’s basically the same concept, but the folks that grew up with the classic rock songs don’t want to think of them as oldies.
I also have to say that the electronic synthesizer music of the early 80s is everywhere these days. A lot of the today’s electronic stuff is channeling early 80s music (I realized this while watching “Stranger Things” - the electronic score could be something for an album released last week).
Perhaps that had something to do with the fact the target audience for most Top 40 stations was mainly teenagers. For someone whose 16, four years *is *a long time since it’s one-fourth of your lifespan.
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I think “classic rock” is the new “oldies”. It’s basically the same concept, but the folks that grew up with the classic rock songs don’t want to think of them as oldies.
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That’s because what is now “classic rock” used to be “album-oriented rock” (“AOR” for short) when it was new and usually played on AOR-formatted FM radio stations. What are now “oldies” were played by AM Top 40 stations.
It seems the “music of your life” format, the 40’s has completely disappeared from radio. No more Glenn Miller.
Sirius XM has some 40’s music including Glenn Miller. However, it is very difficult to find much 1930’s radio music except for bits and pieces on the internet. That is my idea of the true oldies. However, Sirius XM does have station 148 that plays very old radio shows like Fibber Mcgee and Molly from the same period that predates mainstream TV including period commercials so I know those types of recordings still exist. Did they even have music only radio stations in the 1930’s and 40’s? From what I gather, many of the more popular ones had ‘shows’ that were like TV without the video.
Oh yeah. I listened to some from Old Time Radio (including the Klan of the Fiery Cross, which I’d read about). Plenty of missing episodes in the shows I listened to, though. I still want to hear some of those early Superman, and the first Green Hornet episodes. There are other sites and apps, too.
That’s what I gather, as well: Full-service radio, a format now limited to completely independent community radio stations (and, in a more specific form, public radio stations)*, was the order of the day until television knocked the non-musical entertainment out of the realm of radio. You can even date the end of the Old Time Radio era by the day the last two original mass-market radio dramas, Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, went off the air: September 30, 1962.
It makes sense, in that if you only have a couple radio stations per town you want them to do everything a radio station can do.
*(Public radio is a mass-produced version of community radio, in that, even though individual stations have a huge degree of autonomy, the fact they’re public radio stations implies a rather consistent format and feel in addition to a lot of the same programming.)
Seems to me it’s always been about 30 years. When I was a teenager it was music from the 50’s. Now it’s rare to hear any music made before 1980.