Has anyone heard 80's songs on their "Oldies" radio station?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by PaulKTF, Jul 9, 2013.

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  1. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Our local Oldies station (Clear Channel owned, if that matters) has started to play songs from the 80's (IE: Michael Jackson's Beat It) right along side the 60's and 70's songs.

    Has anyone else noticed this on their so-called "Oldies" station?
     
  2. throbbin tower

    throbbin tower Forum Resident

    There's one in my area that includes 80's material....up to say, '84 or so...
     
  3. Cambot

    Cambot Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicagoland, USA
    "Oldies" will always be 50s/early 1960s. If there's an Oldies station playing 80s music, they're going off-playlist.
     
  4. Doug Sclar

    Doug Sclar Forum Legend

    Location:
    The OC
    I rarely listen to FM radio anymore, but the last time I listened to KRTH LA, they were playing plenty of 80's songs.

    To me, oldies are 50s and 60s. When I was growing up, there was only one oldies station, XERB 690, and they played mainly R&B and DooWop from the early 50s with Wolfman Jack at the helm. In the 70's, KRTH started playing oldies and they were mid to late 50's till the end of the 60s. On a rare occasion they'd play something from the early 70s.
     
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  5. Frank

    Frank Senior Member

    30-year-old songs on an Oldies station seems appropriate. They were playing 20-year-old songs on Oldies stations in the 80s.

    Maybe they need a new designation like "Ancients" or "Relics" for stations limited to the really moldy oldies.
     
  6. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Agreed that "Oldies" = 50's and 60's. That's why hearing 80's songs bugged me…
     
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  7. pbuzby

    pbuzby Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL, US
    The classic rock station here introduced 80's songs around ten years ago.
     
  8. throbbin tower

    throbbin tower Forum Resident

    Agreed...hearing Dion one minute and Duran Duran the next is just too much....so I opt for another station for true oldies.
     
  9. Bradfinger

    Bradfinger Forum Resident

    Location:
    Midland, Georgia
    Our local station WAFM (FM 95) started adding 80's music about three years back. The first time I heard U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" I called them and told them there was no way songs popular when I was in high school could be oldies. They reminded me the song was 23 years old at that point.
     
  10. MarkTheShark

    MarkTheShark Senior Member

    We had an oldies station, "Magic 104" (WJMK 104.3) which launched in 1984. When they started, their rotation was very 1950s and Motown heavy, covering the 1960s and into the very early 1970s (but not deep into the 1970s). When they first started, they also had a thing called "Future Gold" where they would play the current songs by Huey Lewis, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson etc. but they dropped that quickly.

    WLS-FM (94.7) was called "Real Oldies" for some time -- pretty decent selection of songs compared to what I have heard on the radio lately. I would hear stuff like "Early In The Morning" by Vanity Faire and other songs that generally have fallen through the cracks. I haven't followed them consistently, but lately they are not using the word "oldies" but identify as "classic hits," with a lot of 1980s, and the songs I'd hear that would catch me off guard are mostly gone. I agree that to me, 1980s songs do not qualify as "oldies," but then I remember that in 1984, "I Want To Hold Your Hand" was 20 years old, and now "Our Lips Are Sealed" is 32 years old...
     
  11. JeffMo

    JeffMo Format Agnostic

    Location:
    New England
    It does seem sort of strange the New Wave becomes Oldies!

    The late WFNX out here played 80s and 90s alternative during the Leftover Lunch - I miss that program and radio station.
     
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  12. lastdamdown

    lastdamdown Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hillsboro, OR
    Portland, Oregon's only oldies station includes some pre-MTV early '80's tunes. Very little from the '50's.
     
  13. BadJack

    BadJack doorman who always high-fives children of divorce

    Location:
    Boston, MA
    The Oldies station in Boston went off the air a year or two ago, but I'd taken to calling them Disco 103 by then. I swear they played "Turn the Beat Around" every 20 minutes.

    The '80's crept in subtlely. It started with songs that had an oldies sound, like "Old Time Rock n' Roll" and "Uptown Girl". Not long before they ended, I was hearing the likes of "With or Without You".
     
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  14. Doug Sclar

    Doug Sclar Forum Legend

    Location:
    The OC
    I should mention, for those that didn't live through it, that top 40 AM radio in the 60s rarely played songs that weren't on the charts. In other words, once a song fell off the charts it was never heard from again. There were a few exceptions, where they would play old #1 songs on the anniversaries of their chart appearances, but those were about the only time you'd hear them.

    Consequently, I rarely heard hit songs from the 50s until the 70s. I first started listening to my own radio in the summer of 59, so if a song was on the charts before that, I never heard it until the oldie stations of the 70s started playing them. When I first heard Sha-Na-Na, most of the songs they played were new to me. That led me to start seeking them out. That was a few years before KRTH started playing oldies.

    Heck, I didn't even know about Elvis prior to his early 60s hits. The same went for Chuck Berry or any of the other pioneers of Rock.
     
  15. tonyc

    tonyc Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    I have recently noticed 80s songs once in a while being played on oldies stations. I think it is a good idea since there are plenty of good songs to choose from to freshen their stale playlists.
     
  16. davidshirt

    davidshirt =^,,^=

    Location:
    Grand Terrace, CA
    Yeah. But the 80s was two decades ago. U2's The Joshua Tree came out 26 years ago.. So it is understandable that classic rock stations would play songs from the 80's.
     
  17. BadJack

    BadJack doorman who always high-fives children of divorce

    Location:
    Boston, MA
    I think the '80's were like this to some degree. A hit in 1982 was gone forever by '83. I remember all sorts of '80's retrospectives in 1989, and songs like "I Melt with You" and "Always Something There to Remind Me" returned to the airwaves and never really left. This was also the era discussed in a recent thread where forgotten "oldies" like "Red Red Wine" and Sherriff's "When I'm with You" were resurrected and hit #1.
     
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  18. houston

    houston Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dallas, Texas, USA
    98.7 K-LUV in Dallas...60's, 70's, and 80's....

    50's has completely disappeared, as has 1960-63.... no more Maltshop memories

    for that matter, Soul music has disappeared...and REAL R&B is almost gone...the only black music, pre-1995, on radio, is the most homogenized, "safe" sounding stuff....Motown, later Earth, Wind & Fire, Whitney Houston... definitely not her ex-husband, or anything with swagger
     
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  19. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    "Oldies" is merely a marketing term intended for no other purpose than crowdsourcing an audience who have a shared memory of songs that were playing back when they were free, innocent and just starting life with possibilities.
    The marketing term/format is now officially older than the age of the songs that were played back when the format first started up. Worse, the target age demographic for what was once considered "Oldies" is now too old for ad
    agencies to consider them as customers worth marketing to. Therefore, the period of songs had to be moved forward in time, to capture the nostalgic audience that was more within the primary buying demographic.

    However, the term "Oldies", while cemented in one age group's mind as corresponding to music from "Happy Days" through the Nixon Administration, merely registers in the mind of this new target demographic as, "'Old' music;
    too old for me, because I'm not 'old'". So, newer names had to be coined for the same concept: Classic Rock, Classic Hits, Greatest Hits of the '70s, '80s & '90s, etc.

    Still, no station is willing to lose one target demographic to go after another, so they start sprinkling a younger era's songs with the older stuff, with an eventual goal to get rid of the songs that resonate with undesirable listeners,
    as soon as they've crowdsourced enough of the younger demo to keep the ad agencies happy. So, while Culture Club doesn't mix well with Cowsills, it's a work in progress. And frankly, it's all about making a desirable target
    demo feel nostalgic and happy and in the mood to buy products, so I wouldn't get so uppity about what "Oldies" means: it means eventually, you WILL become too old to justify your music being played at all.




    Now playing on Ariel Stream: Colbie Caillat - Stay With Me
     
  20. Preston

    Preston Forum Resident

    Location:
    KCMO Metro USA
    Oldies 95 (94.9 FM) does in KCMO.
     
  21. BradOlson

    BradOlson Country/Christian Music Maven

    The origins of the Classic Rock format was that it was originally a niche format spun off of the AOR format of the late 60s-80s but now, Classic Rock formats are dominant and stations that truly resemble the AOR stations and the progressive/freeform formats are the niche due to the tighter focus of Classic Rock stations. With these origins, you would think that you'd hear Moby Grape or Mason Proffit or Hot Tuna often, but you don't. BTW, on the city bus on the way home from work, I heard Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" on the station, and it didn't even chart "Mainstream Rock."
     
  22. Michael P

    Michael P Forum Resident

    Location:
    Parma, Ohio
    Some 80's music actually fits in with 60's oldies. The Jam "Start", for example (but that was not popular enough in the U.S. ). However I stopped listening to "oldies radio" when they started playing Disco :hurlleft:
     
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  23. MarkTheShark

    MarkTheShark Senior Member

    I remember hearing the occasional "oldie" (which meant anything not current) mixed in with contemporary hits on WLS and WCFL in the 1970s. (But in the 1970s you could hear Led Zeppelin, ELO, John Denver, Carpenters, Eagles, Cheech & Chong, Glen Campbell and Helen Reddy all on one station, and it all somehow fit together!)

    By the 1980s we had "Hot Hits B-96" which seemed to have an extremely narrow selection of songs compared to what I'd been used to. (They eventually went "urban.") But in general by the 1980s, a station like that wouldn't be caught dead playing a song from the 1960s or 1970s. Although in the 1980s I would hear "oldies" mixed in on WLS-AM (that's AM). Before they switched to all talk, they had a really bizarre format with different styles of music from different eras...one night I remember driving downtown and heard the station's top of the hour legal ID at midnight, then they played "Mr. Sandman," which was anachronostic, but very cool!
     
  24. goodiesguy

    goodiesguy Confide In Me

    Location:
    New Zealand
    The once awesome Radio station in NZ, Solid Gold, 90.2FM used to play classic 60's and 70's music, and is where I first heard classics such as House of the Rising Sun, Good Vibrations, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Twist & Shout, Last Train To Clarksville, Crocodile Rock. I still have cassettes full of this stuff off the radio. It was so great, they'd play a Hollies song, next it would be some proggy type rock tune from the 70's.

    But as time went on, it got worse, and I stopped listening. Now they've changed their name, and are called "The Sound". I barely hear 60's music on it at all, and most is crappy 1970's ballads and 1980's crap like "Livin' on a Prayer".

    Such a shame a great station turned to absolute crap.
     
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  25. OldShiftyEyes

    OldShiftyEyes Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vermont
    Yup. Over the years, KONO in San Antonio went from 50s and 60s, to 60s and 70s, to almost all disco (it seemed) with the rare 80s track sneaking in. Recently moved to Vermont, and I now have an "oldies" station that does it right.
     
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