Artists you never hear on over the air Oldies radio anymore

Surprised how many.
Barry Manilow, Olivia Newton John and the Captain and Tennile come to mind. They were so omnipresent in my youth.
And I think I have heard more young Americana artists sing "A Change is Gonna Come ", than actually heard Sam Cooke on the radio in the last 10 years.

 

My Oldies station are on AM, so they rarely get any love. Such a shame,

 

Anybody who stopped recording by 1969, but mostly 50's performers.

 

What's a radio??

 

Bread, Rare Earth, 3 Dog Night, Grand Funk, Helen Reddy, a lot of Motown, etc. Even the Carpenters don't get much airplay compared to a few years ago. It's all Eagles and Tom Petty.

 

I hear them all the time. Try big8radio.com online. You won’t be disappointed.

I’m forever hearing a semi obscure song that I recognize but I’m not sure who the artist is. Luckily for me, their player screen tells me who it is.

 

Have oldies stations gone all classic rock then? Even the likes of Rare Earth and Grand Funk I tend to think of as classic rock instead of oldies. I think of oldies as being largely pop from the 1950s and 60s with a lot of pre-Beatles (Four Seasons, Buddy Holly, Motown, Beach Boys, Elvis, doowop, Petula Clark, Lesley Gore and the like), and classic rock being more rock and hard rock such as Led Zep, Boston, AC/DC and of course Eagles and Tom Petty. But radio station formats do change over time.

 

Consider that the 70s started fifty plus years ago.
Fifty years prior to that was the 1920s.
Puts oldies in perspective.

 

It's funny, when I was a kid in the mid-'80s, Billy Joel was having current hits on Top 40 -- and the big oldies station here played stuff from the '50s and early '60s. Strictly pre-Beatles stuff. Shortly before that same local oldies station went off the air in the early 2000s, I remember hearing "Uptown Girl" on it and being really freaked out.

 

Yeah. Nirvana and Pearl Jam might be considered oldies now. I'm getting old.

 

We only have one solid oldies station that I can find, but it's a great one! Lots of 50's and 60's when I'm typically in the car. In the mid-oughts it even played 30's and 40's overnight, but I don't know if it still does. Owned by a local public school system 88.7 WFOS

 

I wish someone would craft a “deep-cut oldies” station where you could hear, say, “That Makes It Tough” by Buddy Holly or “Western Ford Gateway” by Elton John, instead of hearing their top 3 hits for the zillionth time.

Maybe there is one, and I just don’t know about it.

 

I found a good oldies station based in Vineland NJ. The signal is kind of weak and I only get it in my car. It reaches Philly, N. Delaware and S. Jersey. A lot of 50's, 60's a 70's. It is 92.1 FM.

 

WCBS-FM in New York used to play the best 50s music back in the 1980s. That was considered the definitive “oldies decade” for a long time.

I loved listening to the Doo-Wop show on Sunday nights way back when. To me, that kind of music exemplified what oldies music was about. Nowadays I’m not sure where you can find that type of music on the airwaves.

 

While we have a really good oldies FM station here in the Milwaukee area, the one SONG they
never play (and probably nowhere else) is Ray Stevens' "Ahab The Arab". But yet it's a hilarious
recording with Ray doing all of the voices. Of course, it's probably no linger considered PC,
but it should still get played. A perfect early sixties novelty record.

 

WCBS screwed up when they fired all their legendary DJs for a computerized one, then when that didn't work they went to a boring generic "all the hits from the 60s-80s" format.

Also WMTR AM used to play all the crooner stuff from the 50s etc. but they too went generic.

I'm glad to see Cousin Brucie return to WABC AM on Saturday nights, and WOR AM now has a program hosted by Joe Piscopo that plays Sinatra and Dean Martin songs on Sunday nights.

 

I hear very few Burt Bacharach songs on the radio anymore, I remember in the late 80s the local NJ lite FM station used to play Dionne Warwick songs all the time. Last time I heard them they were playing Bon Jovi and Mariah Carey, what's "Lite" about them? ?

 

Al Jolson

 

Only possibility would be WFMU, otherwise don't know who would play that

 

The Buckinghams

 

The trend in retro radio formats are Classic Hits - which is less "Oldie"-oldies, more rock standards, more '80s. The envelope moves up to capture those nostalgic Gen-X'ers. It's definitely not the age when 'Boomers were the target demographic for these stations. So mainstream, they consider "Brandy" an "oh-wow".

 

From my very limited exposure to oldies radio, 90% of everything before 1968.

 

And 92.1 in Vineland plays a lot of Four Seasons.

 

still a lot of Motown in Philly, but yes to Helen Reddy

 

I tried to listen to Ray Stevens recently -"Even Stevens " lp -- really dated, and not in a cool way -- in the sell pile