It boils down to what program directors of the stations that play songs of the era like.
In addition, people are surveyed. I took part in one years ago; they played small snippets of songs and had you rate them.
I honestly thought they were a country group from Nashville! They certainly sounded authentic, at least they did to my then19 year old self. I wasn’t much for country music at the time, either.
I knew already then that they were Dutch because they were sometimes announced as a Dutch band on TV, and they were in a lot of German TV shows in 1976. And yes, for some reason the Dutch have a special love for country music, especially for country rock and also country pop like “Mississippi”, I’ve noticed it a lot of times. Maybe one of our Dutch posters can explain where that comes from.
My tracker blocker warns me against most of those pages except, for some reason, 1989. It’s mostly crap; I see Milli Vanilli, Tiffany, NKOTB. My guess is that a lot of songs in this category will be stuff that sold well to preteens, but the songs that “endure” will be those that people listened to in their teens. Nobody is nostalgic for 7th grade.
? This isn’t an instrumental. Did I read something wrong?
Good one 
No that’s what I meant. Instrumentals don’t get remembered as much. I never hear it on the classic rock stations, or period movies. If you’re not Classical Gas, you get forgotten. 
No.
But yes.
It’s all done by focus groups. Personal taste from the staff does not enter the formula anymore. It’s sad. And it’s also the reason you always get the same four or five songs by Eagles, CCR, Stones, AC/DC and all the other staples on classic rock radio, never any of the ‘deep cuts’. Note that this doesn’t always correlate with how a song actually charted at its prime. An example is Eagles greatest hits, which is one of the best selling albums of all time and possibly the best selling compilation. It effectively cemented the Eagles canon to the point where “everyone” knows these songs. So they are recognized and when focus groups rate songs by Eagles, tracks that were not really hits when first released, are being made into what is now considered the classic tracks by the band.
I started doing extra work in radio 1977 as a 16 year old. We picked our own tracks then. But it hasn’t been done like that since the mid to late 90’s.
As an aside: whenever it’s time to get a focus group going, the music director encourages us to try to come up with something, anything to put to the test. Maybe there’s something out there we’ve missed, maybe some old song suddenly gains popularity out of the blue and may crack the hegemony and monotony of classic radio*.
Inevitably almost every one of the songs suggested score at the bottom with the focus group. So the station keeps playing Stones Start Me Up but Waiting for a Friend is rarely heard (caveat: this might shift from market to market. Maybe you get the latter, but we don’t get it here)
*e.g. Kate Bush/Running up that Hill
§[quote=“Ponch8, post:29, topic:976509”]
although I take offense to your calling Milli Vanilli “crap”!
[/quote]
Agreed. The whole controversy aside, a good song is a good song. I’m not going to defend MV, but labels tend to stick and get in the way of evaluating something on its own merits. People felt cheated by something that is today common practice and 30 years later it’s still labeled crap. The music industry is and has always been corrupt, exploiting songwriters, artists and doing their very best to pull a fast one on the audience. Milli Vanilli is not the worst of the bunch. They only got caught.
Are you guys aware that revered The Clash was a fabricated as Sex Pistols or Spice Girls? Put together for the explicit purpose of creating a Punk Group with the cred and authenticity to sell and be relevant to the punk hungry crowd.
Your guess is quite accurate (although I take offense to your calling Milli Vanilli “crap”!) 
In the columns, Ross often mentions that hits by teen idols are among the most “lost.” This holds across all eras, from the early '60s to the recent past. As others have mentioned, instrumentals are also over-represented in the “lost” lists.
I’ve seen that. About the only song by Traffic you hear these days is “Low Spark.” They have plenty of other options (including “Feelin’ Alright” which you only hear in the Joe Cocker version).
SirusXM does have a deep tracks channel. I just heard “Remember” by Free, a group that is usually only represented by “All Right Now” and nothing else.
Thanks for the link, and I’m definitely going to check it out.
I’m still baffled. Neither of your cited songs Crystal Blue Persuasion nor Grazing in the Grass are instrumentals.
But yes, Classical Gas is about the only instrumental piece that made it big then, or that is remembered fondly now.
Tubular Bells enjoyed a short heyday too, but nothing like CG did.
Do you ever wonder if the familiarity of having heard those other (been played for years on the station) songs have made them more appealing to the audience and they’ve tied more memories to it or they just feel more familiar and whatnot? I guess I mean, I kinda wonder if both were brand new songs to them, they’d still choose the same songs in the same proportions? No way to know. By the way, did you see much difference in preference by age group back then?
Speaking of instrumentals…
I don’t listen to radio so much, so I’m not the best qualified here, but it seems to me that Albatross by Fleetwood Mac - which was a big international hit - has been pretty much forgotten.
j
There were two hit versions of “Grazing in the Grass.” The original was an instrumental, and the remake had vocals:
Seems like virtually any adult contemporary hit from those decades gets no air time these days. The Carpenters, Neil Diamond, Dionne Warwick, Barry Manilow and surely many other chart busters get little or no play on any oldies stations I’ve heard.
Depends on what you listen to. The dedicated 60s or 70s channel on Sirius has all those performers. I haven’t listened to over-the-air radio in years: all ads, no music, or so it seems. Yecch.
Instrumentals you still hear a lot on classic radio:
Green Onions by Booker T and the MGs
Little Wing by SRV
Pipeline by Dick Dale
Miserlou by Dick Dale
Wipeout by the Surfaris
Frankenstein by the Edgar Winter Group
YYZ by Rush
Jessica by the Allman Brothers
In Memory of Elizabeth Reed - The Allman Brothers
Ghost Riders in the Sky
Eruption by Van Halen
Tequila - The Champs
I’ll bet all those get as much or more play than ‘Classical Gas’, which I actually haven’t heard on the radio in a very long time.
Mississippi:
Does Baccara get any airplay in Europe these days?
Latin hits from the 60s aren’t played much. “The Girl from Ipanema” by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz was as gigantic as a hit could be and won Record of the Year over “Downtown,” Petula Clark; “Hello, Dolly!” Louis Armstrong; “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” The Beatles; and “People,” Barbra Streisand, as well as part of the album of the year.
“Mas Que Nada” by Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66 was another huge hit in 1966. It’s a candidate for the greatest pop song ever. But unlike “Girl,” the lyrics aren’t in English.
I listen to Sirius XM and they are rarely played on the 60s channel. Maybe some of the jazz stations play them, but I’ve never encountered the songs there either. I’d put them on a loop and make them a station.