KRTH 101.1 introduced the oldies format to radio in 1973. Oldies were songs from 1953-1963. Ten to twenty year old songs were oldies. Source: Am oldie.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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Based on this, songs from 2014 could be "oldies". Those songs are too new for me to know!!!
.......stop making me feel old, sir!!!
Following this premise, and assuming we are only talking about recorded music and not composition. Then oldies would be a very narrow or perhaps even inexistent genre. The first audio recording was in 1857 but it wasn't until 1877 with the invention of the phonograph that we had a reliable method of both recording and reproduction. According to Wikipedia, the verified oldest person is 116, so they were born somewhere around 1909. So, only music recorded in that stretch of time would be oldies. However if we limit further to professionally recorded and commercially distributed music. Then there would be no oldies music, as the first album sold for mass consumption was in 1924, a recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture.
Philosophically speaking it would meant that there's no old music, yet. I find that beautiful and tragic at the same time.
As much as I hate the reminder of my own mortality, they don't call'em deadies. The term is meant to burn.
Oldies is, and forever shall be, music from before the 80s. There are deep reasons I'm not lucid enough to articulate at the moment, but I'm certain of it.
Oldies is 1940s and 50s only.
Everything else actually has distinct genres that are well defined.
you've got the oldies and classic rock pre-80s. the new crap from the 90s and on, and the greatest decade of music ever sandwiched in between.
You must be really old. Oldies is anything from before 1995, grandpa. That's 30 years if you won't do the math.
To put it in perspective, that's the same time between Joan Jett's I love Rock n Roll, a 1980 hit and Benny Goodman with his big band music Little Girl Don't Cry. Elvis wouldn't become a thing until 1954.
Wait, wasn't it "big girls don't cry"? Or are we thinking of two different songs?
Yeah, totally different. Big girls don't cry was Four Seasons, 1962. It was also an oldie in 1980. So I'd say the window for oldie is actually 25 years.
I'm not actually familiar with little girl, don't cry. I googled 1950 big band music.
“oldies” is new-wave synthesiser music. “Classic Rock” is Pearl Jam and Radiohead.
.......please stop.
32-track digital audio workstations became widely available in 1996, paving the way for all-digital audio recording, editing and mastering in more settings than ever before. Supposedly, 1999 saw the first No. 1 hit produced entirely in the digital domain. Almost anything released before that timespan would have been subject to information loss either at recording, or later during post-production.
So I'd say, "before 1996" counts as "oldies" since all we have left from that time is low quality analog material anyway.
To the same effect, any video game console without a digital video/audio output could be considered "retro". By that definition, a PlayStation 2 would be retro, but an original Game Boy wouldn't, because its display is driven digitally…
That is probably the most technically incorrect description of the quality difference between digital and analog audio recordings. The analog audio recordings are the actual high quality recordings, especially in the beginnings of the digital recording area. Digital audio in the 90s still had a lot of flaws that analog audio didn't.
And analog recordings were at that time also already produced in multitask recordings in the likes of 32 tracks and above, so that's no point for it as well.
Sorry just had to point out that quality thing, and that it can't be used as a breaking point in time where suddenly all audio productions were high quality because they were digital.