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Do kids really like oldies?

I just finished reading this article by Sean Ross titled 'Double Wide Radio'. What some are calling train wrecks, nay actually be what certain radio listeners want to hear...

radioinsight.com

The Double-Wide Radio Station

The wildly successful Adult Hits stations of the early ’00s — many of them still so — sometimes told listeners
radioinsight.com radioinsight.com
 
KilowattKat said:
I just finished reading this article by Sean Ross titled 'Double Wide Radio'. What some are calling train wrecks, nay actually be what certain radio listeners want to hear...

radioinsight.com

The Double-Wide Radio Station

The wildly successful Adult Hits stations of the early ’00s — many of them still so — sometimes told listeners
radioinsight.com radioinsight.com
Click to expand...

First, I don't think the average listener perceives "train wrecks" as such. We tend to be more critical of the on-air presentation than they are. (That's not a bad thing, because it makes us program the best content we can.) The Classic Hits/Classic Rock/Adult Hits listener only really cares if the music is familiar and if it among those songs that are either their favorites or tolerable enough that they won't change stations.

If you look at the sample playlists Sean included in his column, those are pretty faithful to the Adult Rock format concept, but still don't go so deep as to lose listeners. The three programmers highlighted are doing an excellent job with their balancing acts.

Will it work in the long term? We'll find out ... but in the current radio environment, what's to be lost by trying a deeper approach to AH?
 
Overall, I don't think we can say that, generally, kids today like Oldies. What they like, on an individual basis, is songs that they enjoy that happen to fall into the category of being "oldies". In a previous post, I mentioned that a 20-year-girl really likes the 1958 hit, "Born Too Late" by The Poni-Tails. Play almost anything else from 1958 and it's "eh", or "yuk".
 
Do kids like oldies? The news articles exist because it is not usual. If kids liked oldies there would not be news stories about it. Having said that, kids will like certain songs just as I did. But that was a few songs. There does seem less of a ocean's distance between adult and youth music than when I was growing up.
 
Can you really call it "Oldies" if you've never heard it before? The whole "Oldies but Goodies" thing was born out of nostalgia for one's youth. But if you are in one's youth and you've never heard the music before, then it's not Oldies -- it's music that's new to you, that just happens to be old. Especially when we're now talking about teens and tweens whose grandparents may even be too young to remember '50s/'60s music when it was new.
 
michael hagerty said:
Yes, because it’s a definition of an older song, not one that depends on personal nostalgia or a time period.

I hadn’t heard most 50’s records other than Elvis until I was 16, but they were no less oldies.
Click to expand...

By that standard would Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller be considered an oldie? It only came out 15 years before Rock Around The Clock.
 
kevtronics said:
Can you really call it "Oldies" if you've never heard it before? The whole "Oldies but Goodies" thing was born out of nostalgia for one's youth. But if you are in one's youth and you've never heard the music before, then it's not Oldies -- it's music that's new to you, that just happens to be old. Especially when we're now talking about teens and tweens whose grandparents may even be too young to remember '50s/'60s music when it was new.
Click to expand...
Exactly. I was introduced to 50s music by commercials for albums and shows like "Happy Days". I didn't live through the decade.

Older style music was on the radio stations that I turned to in order to get away from the new stuff, when oldies was mostly loud music. It was a style I liked at Christmas, and most TV series, especially variety shows, did have those styles.
 
"I Love Rock and Roll" and "Blue Velvet" on the same station. Fortunately, there were several songs between them, each a little softer than the previous one. And a commercial break.
 
vchimpanzee said:
"I Love Rock and Roll" and "Blue Velvet" on the same station. Fortunately, there were several songs between them, each a little softer than the previous one. And a commercial break.
Click to expand...

I'm sure they did it just to annoy you. 😜
 
Torgo Johnson said:
By that standard would Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller be considered an oldie? It only came out 15 years before Rock Around The Clock.
Click to expand...
Sorry---just now seeing your reply.

The standard is---and has been since the word first went into popular usage more than 150 years ago---a song that is no longer new. So it's not about comparison to any other older song.

Radio formats have carved music up into eras. Even though the Merriam-Webster Dictionary says you could find people in 1875 using the phrase, a large number of people, especially over 50, especially Americans, think the term refers to early rock and roll. And, as we've gone over (and over) in this thread, that was largely a result of marketing.
 
Was out and about walking my dogs last week and I saw a bunch of kids outside in their front yard listening to "Wooly Bully" from the early 60s... Interesting! I seem to experience that kind of thing more and more these days...
 
Miss Tuned said:
I don't think even parents of a 9-year-old would remember the "Pink Floyd U.S. Tour 1973", which is what it says on this particular shirt!
Click to expand...

Nobody's remembering the tour---it's the strength of the band name. You could have put any year after that and not hurt sales.

Miss Tuned said:
I was born 12 years after that, and I'm 40 this year. Grandparents, maybe?!
Click to expand...

I'm sure there's some of that. Uncles and aunts, too---but some basic math:

The average age of first childbirth in the U.S. in 2022 (last year for available stats) is 27. So the average first-born 9-year-old in this country has a 36-year-old parent. If that kid is the second-born or later, mom and dad are older. You're definitely in the territory where the parent is likely to know (from classic radio play or whatever) "Money" and "Another Brick in the Wall".
 


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