Radio stations nudge oldies format off the air

Whenever Lawrence Cavallo felt nostalgic, he only had to tune the radio to New York City's WCBS-FM, the legendary oldies station.

"They played a lot of stuff that conjured up great memories and reminded me of growing up in the Bronx," says Mr. Cavallo, a telecommunications project manager who now lives in New Jersey. He was especially thrilled when his 8-year-old son recently discovered the music of the King of Rock 'n' Roll and began asking to hear the station in the car.

So much for hound dogs and blue suede shoes. Elvis has left the building, along with the Supremes, the Beach Boys, and a famous Big Apple disc jockey named Cousin Brucie. WCBS-FM dumped its oldies format and fired its staff on Friday, joining a long list of stations from coast to coast that have abandoned '60s and '70s "feel-good" music over the past six months.

Meanwhile, many existing oldies stations are barely holding on, the victims of declining ratings and radio-industry apathy. "Golden oldies" stations, home to artists like Frank Sinatra and Glenn Miller, are in even worse trouble. Ultimately, observers say, the radio industry simply doesn't have much interest in baby boomers like Cavallo, let alone the 70-somethings who prefer Ella Fitzgerald to Otis Redding.

"The day you turn 45, there is not necessarily a radio station concerned with serving you unless you can bring your 25-year-old daughter along," says Sean Ross, a radio consultant with Edison Media Research in Somerville, N.J.

Indeed, several of the converted oldies stations - including WCBS and others in Chicago and Baltimore - have begun wooing younger audiences with a popular new radio format called "Jack."

The stations, with names like 100.7 Jack FM, share the snarky slogan "playing what we want" and rely on unusually large playlists of songs from the past two or three decades.

They compare their zany musical blends - bouncing from Abba to Mötley Crüe to Coldplay in a manner of minutes - to the randomness of the "shuffle" feature on the ubiquitous iPod music player; in some cases, the stations have dumped their disc jockeys, leaving nothing but promos and commercials between songs.

And what of the oldies? In some metropolitan areas, like Nashville, Tenn., and Raleigh, N.C., competitors swooped in and began offering oldies after stations dropped the format, Mr. Ross says. But other cities - including Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, N.C., Orlando, Fla., and Austin, Texas. - now have no traditional oldies stations to call their own, and the one in Portland, Ore., found itself banished to the obscurity of the AM dial.

Some radio insiders blame ad agencies for losing interest in older customers and their musical tastes.

"When you talk about Motown and the Beatles, you're talking records that are 40 years old, and there are a lot of 30- to 40-year-old decisionmakers who don't have a lot of empathy for this format," says Ross.

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