good article. wonder if Michael Jackson's later success erased the need to play his earlier solo hits when he was a kid. And people want to remember Streisand as a Broadway star/MOR singer , not as someone who had hit singles. Also why her recent music has no audience-- what format would play her?
You still hear three Zombies songs on the radio. --- but I have never heard any of their new music they have released in the past few years on the radio , classic rock or oldies format.
an Oldies station I was listening to played the "Beatles Movie Medley" that came out on 45 --- who approved that release !
There is a local station that has a show on the weekend that is mostly doo-wop. I can only listen for about 15 minutes, before my brain hurts
Hire me as an oldies DJ.....In my collection alone, I'd keep your interest active for many a 3 hour show. Always wanted to do this, not just oldies, but I don't have the bandwidth. I know people are hired to 'DJ' a party ...but that's not the same. I wanna have a radio SHOW !!!! Of course my pirate radio station's call letters would be ARGH !!!!
I've heard just all of these artists in this thread on my favorite radio station. WMCW out of Astor, FL...just north of Orlando. They're pretty much the radio representation of the history of the 'adult contemporary' charts....playing everything from the 1950s to early 1980s. I hear things I've NEVER heard even on Zoomer radio out of Toronto, Canada (and they're pretty darn thorough.) My musical knowledge has went up majorly since I started streaming this startion several years ago. It's the middle of the night so they'll play ANYTHING nw. http://96.31.83.94:8058/stream
Try 88.7 Adelaide's Coast FM in between 6pm and 6am here in Australia. You will have to stream in your time whatever that is
I was trying to quote Onkster 515 Buddy Holly That Makes It Tough but would not work but i repeat 88.7 Adelaide's Coast FM cheers
Joni Mitchell had a few hit singles, but she is gone from Oldies radio. She is strictly a Triple AAA artist, and gets regular airplay.
I have no idea if this branding exists anywhere BUT Palm Springs area, but any of you know the "MeTV" channel, tv repeat nostagia for folks roughly 45-65? Well at 103.1 on the FM dial they have MeTV Radio which is a far more deep cuts than most 60s/70s/smattering of 80s oldies station, daily hear things I haven't heard on radio since they were hits, or ever.
"About eight-in-ten Americans ages 12 and older listen to terrestrial radio in a given week. Weekly terrestrial radio listenership in the U.S. has remained relatively stable in the last two years after dipping slightly in 2020. In 2022, 82% of Americans ages 12 and older listened to terrestrial radio in a given week, according to Nielsen Media Research data published by the Radio Advertising Bureau. Weekly listenership dropped from 89% in 2019 to 83% in 2020, a decline that coincided with the beginning of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak." For National Radio Day, key facts about radio listeners and the radio industry in the U.S.
While I found that url a bit alarming, and this station has SHOCKINGLY little internet presence, I'm digging it, Thanks for link. (that is, I had no way of finding their feed by googling them, so this link especially useful)
They're all over the place. List of MeTV affiliates - Wikipedia They have a few radio affiliates. MeTV - Wikipedia
The occasional playing of “Mississippi Queen” is heard here, which always results in me sprinting to the Echo Dot to crank the volume.
Wish I had seen this thread sooner when I was lamenting the death of oldies radio in another thread. Great recommendations around here!
I've posted quite a few times here about our online stations, the WIWS family. I get that most of you are talking about terrestrial radio, but I thought this might be a good time to acknowledge the absolute uphill battle we've had to have even a small audience playing oldies. I kinda gave up last summer and switched to a mid-century "good music" format, but here later on despite saying I don't regret it, we have almost no listeners. We don't have the bandwidth to run this as a full-time endeavor, so I get that for some people just listening regularly would require fresh content, and we just don't have the capability to deliver that with jobs and kids. We'd set up these stations to emulate the sound of vintage radio...AM processing, jingles, commercials, etc. I think we got pretty close, and have had something different. But playing oldies/forgotten artists has seemingly become quicksand as people now are used to hearing just what they want to hear. If you look around there are people all over the place bemoaning the loss of variety and oldies - look at all this diversity on this chart from 1964! - but when we tried to play that, all we got were music aficionados, and there aren't really enough of them to support the gazillion people like me and my wife trying to do this. We pay for this, and our Patreon support has been about 1/3 of operating costs for over two years. We started out playing just 50s/early 60s music, and floundered until Deke Dickerson jumped in and posted about us a few times...suddenly our numbers exploded. But his audience seemed to want the kind of music associated with him, and we literally had people calling him out for asking them to listen to "crap" when we played Pat Boone. A legit artist, a hit record, that apparently nobody - or at least the only audience we had via him - wanted to hear. So instead of going the route of crazy UFO rockabilly records, we moved into the 60s, and gained a few people with all the mid-late 60s records, but lost our core audience. We apparently really jumped the shark when we started playing "dad rock" - Cream, etc. And really at that point it was over, although we're still here. We've been treading water for 2 1/2 years and, with the loss of my wife's job of 20 years, the end is probably now in sight in a few months. So I ask you, while we're still up and running, what would you like to hear? We have a huge library - I'd hesitate to tell you how much money we've spent on all this, with nothing to show for it - and stacks of vintage radio spots here undubbed. We tried going back to 50s/early 60s with no interest, and an all-60s station tanked, as did our experiments with 70s. I'm happy to go back to playing oldies just to see what happens but I fully admit I haven't cracked the code of what people want to hear. If we just play hits, there are lots of people doing that. If we just play hits and lower charting cuts, it's kind of the same thing. We WERE playing hits plus a ton of deep cuts, but that totally limits our audience. Please don't respond with links to other stations you like saying, "these guys are great, be more like them!" - they already exist! So I ask you - what would you ACTUALLY listen to and not just tune in once or twice and then move on? And is the AM radio filter a turn off? We don't have a huge library of perfect-fidelity, stereo cuts, so a hi-fi station isn't in the cards, plus there are others doing that anyway. 50s/60s? 70s? Forget the commercials and jingles and just play this hits into the 70s? Etc.?
Mountain is still highly underrated (like Free). Their discographies are pretty consistent which is more than can be said for a lot of their contemporaries.
Many are too quick to toss them into the “O-H-W” category, but the deeper dive shows more than that for both.
