I’m another early 40s person who grew up with oldies being 50s through early 60s. I have only been comfortable with the definition of “oldie” advancing one year for every 2 years of calendar time, so in the 34 years since I had heard of “oldies”, I am not surprised at anything through around 1980 being played, nor does it feel that weird.
Same thing goes for “classic rock”, which around 1990 meant anything from the mid-60s through the end of the 70s, so these days I would not find it weird to hear something from the mid-90s on.
What would be weirder would be to hear “deep cuts” on the radio, and famous singles from the top 20 oldies/classic rock artists don’t count.
The other thing about the “oldies” and “classic rock” designations is that it’s a bit of a Venn diagram once you hit the mid-60s. I grew up with all the Beatles songs being played on oldies stations, but only the later stuff hitting the classic rock station (unless they were doing a Beatles show.) There’s also plenty of stuff from the later 60s (say, “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” or “Kiss Him Goodbye (Na Na Hey Hey)”) that would be played on the oldies station, but not the classic rock station. So year cut-offs don’t quite work for oldies vs classic rock–there are genre distinctions there, too. Oldies and classic rock, at least as defined by radio station programming in the 80s and 90s, overlap a number of years.
Yeah, you would hear “Love Child” by Diana Ross and the Supremes (1968) or Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” (1968) on the oldies station, but you wouldn’t hear them on the classic rock stations mixed between The Who and Pink Floyd.
Dude, Smells Like Teen Spirit is closer in time to The Beatles than now - 21 years to 26 years - and an entire generation has grown to adulthood never knowing Cobain as a living being. Just face it, grunge is oldies.
Oldies never referred to a specific period for me. It’s just old stuff. I voted for the 80s since three decades is pretty old. Despite the similarly temporal name, “classic rock” is actually fixed in time to the late 60s/70s.
But if you listen to “classic rock” stations, you’ll find that it actually has temporally shifted as well. Our classic rock station here is 97.9 The Loop, and they play stuff into the 90s. Sample run of songs from today’s playlist: Killer Queen-Queen, Foxey Lady-Hendrix, Bad to the Bone-George Thorogood, Alive-Pearl Jam, Dazed and Confused-Led Zeppelin […] Rock You Like a Hurricane - Scorpions.
I’m sure that’s true (I don’t listen to radio any more). Just saying that that’s how the terms have fixed in my mind. “Classic rock” got fixed for me since I listened to plenty of it, and it always referred to the time period I mentioned. “Oldies” I never really listened to, and so the term never grew beyond its literal meaning–or perhaps more accurately, it was fixed enough to mean “stuff a few decades old” but not “stuff from the 50s and early 60s”. I’d guess that the variation in definitions presented here is for largely the same kind of reasons.
we have two oldies stations in la county k-earth 101 which has moved into 80s pop (a lot of 80s pop I thought I was 9 or 10 )
and 95.5 klos who plays the 70- 90s hard rock (and things like the eagles )as brian ( of mark and brian fame) told me once "KLOS always does what it always does … but eventually they just becomes oldies … like they’ve never stopped playing guns and roses since the beginning … there just old now is all "
oh and just for clarification anything before 1950 is "old time radio " including the pre tv shows