In the 90s, I was listening to the 70’s on the Oldies radio station.
By that gauge, we are past due for 80s to be on the same station.
What is the key issue here?
Oldies stations are for baby boomers and the music they remember. That still means the 60s and 70s.
There’s an oldies station around here that not only plays the 60s/70s but also includes the 80s.
Never. “Oldies” doesn’t refer to the age of the record; it refers to the recording industry culture during a specific time period. “Oldies” refers to music that was recorded between the release of Rock Around the Clock, and the time when the American Bandstand dress code stopped requiring young men to wear a coat and tie while on camera.
In 1962, Tower Records stores filed Garry Lewis and the Playboys under “Oldies.”
Well, they did on planet kaylasdad99, anyway.
Do they still have oldies stations? When I last visited Dallas in 2010 station 98.7 K-Luv (oldies) was primarily playing songs from the late 60s through the 70s with maybe some from the early 80s thrown in there. Back in the 1980s they used to play stuff from the 50s and early 60s along with a few songs from the 70s. I can’t remember the last time I heard “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” on that station but it was in the mid-1990s I think.
The “classic” rock station in my town plays “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns 'n Roses on occasion. I was in 7th grade the first time I heard that song. 
well, it’s an oldie where I come from
WLS, which is Chicago’s “oldies station”, plays pretty much that same format (though I don’t think they play much, if anything, from 1980 or beyond). I, too, miss the early rock-and-roll and pre-British Invasion stuff which used to be found on an “oldies” format station, but I have to guess that program directors have found that relatively few people want to hear that music anymore.
(FWIW, you can still find it on satellite radio, and on digital music channels on cable and satellite TV.)
The oldies station in my area regularly plays “What’s Love Got To Do With It”, which is from what, 1984? It seems that 50s music has been relegated to XM radio and very low powered AM stations, and that oldies stations are now a combination of late 70s adult contemporary and what was being played on classic rock stations 15 or 20 years ago.
Um…now? Unless they’re specifically New Wave or Synthpop, everything pre-1990 in my mp3 collection is labeled “Oldies.” Isn’t music from more than 20 years ago usually considered oldies? Hell, online you can listen to Big R Radio’s sub-station devoted to “classic” 90s music.
This. “Oldies” is a certain time period, not just any music older than the current music.
WCBS here, which I think of as a quintessential oldies station, plays 80s music back to back with 50s and 60s music. The scary thing is, it doesn’t seem particularly out of place.
80s music fits into Classic Rock = Anything that was a hit beyond ten years previous to the present day.
Oldies stations (one could arguably call them classic rock stations, but everyone refers to them as “the oldies station”) in Kentucky and North Carolina have been playing GnR for at least 7 years. And Appetite came out in '88. So in at least some places, the late 80’s/early 90’s are long since “oldies.”
Damn, it kind of blows your mind to think that songs by Prince, Boy George and Blondie, as well as the Thriller album, are now older than tunes by Elvis, Buddy Holly and the Four Tops were when they were getting play on Oldies stations in the 1980s.
see, to me “oldies” just means “pop music from the 50s, 60s, and early 70s”. It’s hard to categorize “pop” music because even though the idea is more or less the same, the sound is totally different depending on what era you live in. From the 80s onwards, the pop scene is neatly categorized into decades. an 80s song can be easily identifiable but it’s harder to group pop music from the 50’s-early 70’s into neat little decade-by-decade listings. i mean, sure you can go down and micromanage the genres into doo wop, motown, rock and roll, rockabilly, beach rock, british invasion, etc but it’s just easier to go on itunes and set a bunch of them to oldies, disco, 80s, 90s, Pop (what i term all post-00’s pop but my younger sister may term 00’s and let the '10 songs like Bieber be “pop” as to differentiate him from say… N’Sync).
I would never call Clapton an “oldie” though. He’s Classic Rock. I don’t particularly have a problem with Guns n Roses being called an “oldies” but to me they’re just an 80s rock band. I would have a problem with bands like Zepplin, AC/DC, or Van Halen being called an “oldie” though. They’re distinct enough to warrant a genre of their own, be it “hard rock”, “heavy metal” or what have you.
Maybe it’s because that’s how it was when I was a teenager, but “Oldies” to me means 50’s and 60’s. The 70’s and 80’s are “Classic Rock” period (which includes sub-genres like New Wave and Hair Metal). I don’t know what the hell the '90s are. Get off my lawn!
Also, I just got XM radio for Christmas so now I have separate channels for music from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, Elvis, Jimmy Buffett, GnR, …
“Oldies 104.3 WOMC” has rebranded themselves in teh past year or two to “Detroit’s Greatest hits”, and plays things from 60s Motown through at least the 80s. According to Wikipedia they dropped “Oldies” in 2006 as well, but reinstated it in a year.
I take “Oldies” is a catch-all label for music that includes any mainstream pop hit recognizable as being from an older musical environment. It’s entirely possible that a song is considered an “Oldie” at the time of its release, and for some songs to never be considered such. It seems unlikely that there’s been a big enough shift in music for Nirvana to be considered “Oldies” yet, and it is difficult to conceive of this ever happening - but at some point there will be a similar overhaul of the music scene that will leave everything before it with a label that indicates it’s no longer in style, and some people might still record in it. “River of Dreams” from Billy Joel, released two years after “Nevermind” by Nirvana, is far more likely of the two to be labeled “Oldies”.
Now. At least that’s what the kids keep telling me…:dubious:
While the terms may be interchangeable to many listeners, “Oldies” and “Classic Rock” are, traditionally, two distinct formats, from a radio programming standpoint.
An “Oldies” format will typically stick to pop hits (typically, “top 40”) from whatever time frame the program director has used to define “oldies”. Depending on the particular listener base and market, this may get skewed towards certain styles of music (e.g., in an urban market, you may get more Motown / R&B songs).
“Classic Rock” formats typically focus on album-oriented rock, usually from around the late 1960s through the late 1980s. While some of the songs and artists in a typical “classic rock” playlist appeared on the top 40, many did not – for example, while bands like Steely Dan, Rush, Traffic, and the Grateful Dead had relatively little chart success (at least, for their singles), they are staples of most “classic rock” formats. Classic rock tends to skew more towards the harder end of the rock music spectrum – you’ll rarely, if ever, hear a disco or true “pop” song on a classic rock station. Some songs and artists frequently appear in both formats, but many are limited to one or the other.
Obviously, this will vary somewhat – you’ll find “classic rock” stations which don’t hew strictly to the format, and you’ll find “oldies” stations which have a broader or more varied format.