Everything new becomes old

I just wrote an Empoprise-BI business blog post on people who evangelize for your business, and the portion of the post on KMET relied extensive on a post from Dave. But when he lamented the disappearance of free-form rock from the radio dial, Dave said the following:

For certain, the one-two punch of disco and "new wave" music in the late '70s and early '80s helped to push SoCal radio dials towards KIIS or KROQ, but think about this... how many "classic disco" or "classic new wave" format stations are around today? That's what I thought.

Dave didn't think hard enough.

As early as the 1990s, if not earlier, both "classic disco" and "classic new wave" formats were starting to appear, if not on fully-programmed radio stations, then certainly on portions of the radio programming. To name two examples, "Disco Saturday Night" and "Flashback Lunch" certainly epitomized the classic disco and classic new wave formats that were very popular.

And, of course, our listening habits have extended well beyond terrestrial radio. In the process of researching my Richard Blade wedding music post, I was alerted to the fact that Blade now hosts a show on Sirius XM radio. Here's what Blade says about his show:

I host a daily show on First Wave, Sirius channel 22, XM channel 44. It's an 80s station (how did you guess?) that features all your favorite music including D Mode, The Smiths, The Cure, Peter Murphy, New Order, Moz, INXS, TFF, Pet Shop Boys, Siouxsie, The Clash and so many others. It is, of course, commercial free.

But you're not really going to see this come into style until the oldies stations get a little less old. You see, the oldies stations shift their programming as the years go by to better address their listening demographics. It used to be tha oldies stations would play music from the 1950's and 1960's, but it appears that the 1950's stuff is being dropped and they're now playing 1960's and 1970's songs. So the classic disco is already there, and the classic new wave is sure to follow.

In a few years, get set for classic grunge.