oldies death

[oldies_listener]

Re: why oldies didn't evolve

Don't want to step on your toes or anything like that, but perhaps the "baby boom" generation should be defined for the sake of clarity. Demographers generally consider people born from 1946 - 1964 to be in the baby boom generation. The earliest boomers turned ten in 1956, and are turning 60 this year. The midpoint birth year for this group is 1955, turning ten in 1965, and turning 60 in 2025. Thus, somewhere around half of the boomer generation would have been forming their musical preferences during the mid fifties to mid sixties.

Personally, I have just turned 50, but my preference in rock and roll music skews strongly about ten years older than would be expected for my age group. I like many of the tunes from the late 60s through the mid 70s, but there is something about the earlier music that just grabs me. I was bitten by this bug in 1969, and have been a different breed of cat ever since. Most folks that I know around the same age like oldies, but not nearly as passionately.


> I wouldn't consider the audience for 50s/early 60s music to
> be boomers...I'm at the older end of that generation, and
> 'most anything pre-1962 is before my time & not something I
> can really relate to. The British invasion was really the
> beginning of the boomers' music. Anything before that would
> be the tail end of the depression generation (whatever it
> was called).
>
> Depending on when in the 90s your friend made his changes,
> he may have been jumping the gun a bit...50s music was still
> viable thru the first half of the decade (though he was
> right in seeing problem on the horizon). Maybe the time
> wasn't quite right when he made his changes.
>

 

[OldiesCat]

oldies

An entirely different concept.

Just because they're both radio formats doesn't mean you can make "apples to apples" comparisons with them. The target audience and what makes them listen to "mish-mash" is a very, VERY different approach to radio than Oldies.

(btw- when you use terms like "mish-mash", you telegraph your bias toward <or against> a format. It's like referring to Oldies as "doo-wop radio" and reflects an obvious negative bias).

>
> Well, the same could be said for "Jack", and you seem to be
> a big fan of that mish-mash.
>

 

[gr8oldies]

Re: why oldies didn't evolve

Case in point, WGRR, Cincinnati. When I moved to within range of the signal the emphasis was still on late 50s/early 60s with a handful of titles from the late 60s. If they'd have evolved more in a late 60s direction it might have helped. My core music years were 1964 on...graduating in 1975. It was only my involvement in radio and radio geekdom that exposed me to all that late 50s/early 60s music.

 

[semoochie]

Re: why oldies didn't evolve

> > This problem has been simmering for years- one thing we
> can
> > blame Oldies radio in general for is the hesitancy to
> evolve
> > out of the '50s and into the '70s. Oldies is THE only
> radio
> > format over the past 20+ years that's been so resistant to
>
> > evolution.
>
> There is a good reason for this. I have a close friend who
> was PD of a highly-rated medium-market "cash cow" oldies
> station in the 90's. He was top 3 25-24 and absolutely
> owned 45-54. He saw the problem coming. At one point, he
> started dropping the 50's and early 60's and adding 70's and
> a few carefully-chosen 80's titles. All familiar,
> mass-appeal hits picked for their compatibility with the
> 60's stuff he was playing. What happened? His ratings went
> DOWN. The few new younger listeners he attracted were many
> times over offset by the drop in TSL among his core
> audience. His "Baby Boomer" P1's didn't want to hear the
> 70's stuff. So he returned to 50's and 60's only and his
> numbers promptly went back up. His station was eventually
> flipped to another format in search of young demos. This
> may simply be a problem that couldn't be fixed.
>
Suddenly pulling everything out before 1964 and adding tons of 70s and 80s titles isn't evolving! It's an assault to your core audience! Slowly dropping songs from 1956 and adding some from 1971 and so on and so on is evolving and if it were done a decade back, no one would have noticed the difference but the audience would have stayed under 55.

 

[OldiesCat]

oldies

Exactly. A slow, gentle, on-going evolution should have started in the mid 90's (at the latest) for most Oldies stations.

> >
> Suddenly pulling everything out before 1964 and adding tons
> of 70s and 80s titles isn't evolving! It's an assault to
> your core audience! Slowly dropping songs from 1956 and
> adding some from 1971 and so on and so on is evolving and if
> it were done a decade back, no one would have noticed the
> difference but the audience would have stayed under 55.
>