‘Oldies’ fans turn to new technology to find tunes once heard on radio

Some of the people who still care most about radio – the people who don’t have gadgets like iPods – are getting the feeling that radio doesn’t care about them.

The baby boomers who grew up in the first decade of rock ‘n’ roll, through the golden age of Top 40, are aging out of the demographic advertisers want to reach. So music of the ‘50s and early ‘60s fades away, radio stations drop the “oldies” label, and the “forever young” generation suddenly finds itself getting old.

“I may be the last one to notice this, but as I station-hopped in the car recently, I noticed the doo-wop and Elvis stuff isn’t there anymore,” a friend said. “The codgers who came of age listening to Sam Cooke and Little Richard are shut out of the airwaves.”

So the codgers – his word – are turning to newer technology, the same way they tuned to whiz-bang transistors a few decades ago.

They pay for satellite services such as XM or Sirius, where Norm Nite has moved his show from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland after the country’s biggest oldies station, WCBS-FM in New York, ended a 33-year run playing “the greatest hits of all time.”

Or they go to the Internet, where you literally can find almost anything – and Chuck Benjamin is trying to remove the “almost.”

Benjamin has every song to hit Billboard’s Hot 100 since 1955. He and Frank Kramer, who have played plenty of them on a number of Cleveland stations, are hoping to do it again, full-time, online.

As the first step, they’ve begun Webcasting a couple of hours of their “Songs You Should Have Heard” and “Teenage Memories” at 6 a.m. Sundays through legatocafe.net.

But to really flip the time machine to the days of Top-40 AM radio, Ray Glasser has the place for you.

He presides over wixy1260.com – a “tribute” site to WIXY, the AM rocker that ruled Cleveland radio for most of its 10 years on the air. It has audio clips of music shows, news and jingles, “Super Sixty” record charts and more.