Erickson Tribune

Arts and Culture

UPDATED: Thursday, December 14, 2006

Where have your favorite songs gone?

Posted on Friday, December 15, 2006
 

Oldies.com connects music lovers to their favorite recordings

By Michele Harris

THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

Pop Quiz!

Red Hot Chili Peppers and Black Eyed Peas are:

A: Ingredients for one of Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals

B: Foods to avoid if you suffer from acid reflux

C: Two of the biggest bands in pop music today

If you answered C, pat yourself on the back, you know pop music. If you didn’t, you may be among the millions of adults who feel abandoned by the music industry.

Gone are the days when you could mosey into the corner record store, buy the catchy tune you heard on the radio, put it on your turntable at home, and sit back and enjoy. Like everything else today, buying music is a complicated endeavor, one that overwhelmingly caters to teenagers. You can brave the bone-rattling rhythm pumping through most music stores to search for your favorite album or you can download songs off your computer and put them on an MP3 player or iPod—assuming you actually have a computer and an iPod.

Once you negotiate all that, there’s no guarantee you’re going to find what you want. Locating Justin Timberlake’s latest hit is easy, but if you’re in search of Carl Perkins’ first recording of “Blue Suede Shoes,” there’s a good chance it’s not at the mall music store. You could probably find it on Apple’s iTunes, but opening the package, enjoying the cover art, and reading the liner notes are such an integral part of the experience that downloading an invisible file just can’t replace it.

Every song in the original order
When you absolutely must have “Rama Lama Ding Dong” by The Edsels, where can you turn? Oldies.com (you can also order from their catalog, Discount Oldies, by calling 1-800-336-4627). With over 2,500 active titles on CD and thousands more available on good old-fashioned vinyl, you’re bound to find what you’re looking for.


oldiesmusic.jpg

Arts and Culture
Image
More Arts and Culture

Postage stamp planned for Bob Hope

Ford introduces 2010 Mustang at LA Auto Show

Where'd it come from? "Go off half-cocked"

Read or Add a Comment?

Purpleumpkin.com

How do you feel about cigarette ads?

If you only read one book this summer, this is the one

Harry Potter blog!

Senior Theatre!

The truth behind "conflict diamonds"

Tools

Write a Comment on Story

Print

Email Story

Add to Favorites

Many of the titles sold through Oldies.com are on the company’s own label, Collectible Records. Collectible prides itself on delivering top-quality products faithful to the original.

If you remember listening to every track on Days of Wine and Roses by Andy Williams, you won’t miss a note with Collectable’s reissue of the classic recording. “We have 50 Andy Williams albums on our labels. These are major albums that people grew up loving and listening to,” says Melissa Greene- Anderson, vice president and general manager of Oldies.com. “Before us, you might only be able to get a ‘greatest hits’ type of album, but if your favorite songs were not the big hits, you couldn’t get them anymore. We keep those [songs] alive by releasing albums as they came out. It’s every song, in the original order.”

Tucked behind an old industrial park in the town of West Conshohocken, Pa., lies this treasure trove of music history. Inside their enormous warehouse are hundreds of long shelves, over-loaded with classics like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, jazz legends like Nancy Wilson and Louis Armstrong, early rock and rollers like Elvis and Buddy Holly, and more recent rockers like Elton John and Van Morrison.

Turn a corner and you’re in their vast book department with thousands of titles covering a wide range of interests but mostly specializing in music and entertainment- related topics.

Classic movies
“We also have a classic movie re-issue label called Alpha Home Entertainment. We’ve got 1,500-1,600 titles,” says Greene- Anderson. The DVDs include hundreds of kitschy B-movie titles you’ve probably never heard of like The Gruesome Twosome, to better- known Hollywood films and old television series.

“We also work with artists themselves,” she adds. “We recently worked with Merv Griffin on 40 of the Most Interesting People of Our Time, a three-DVD set of Merv’s favorites. It’s everyone from Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King to Rose Kennedy and Walter Cronkite. To see Martin Luther King—just talking and joking—it’s incredible. The Hollywood Legends disc includes Lawrence Olivier and Grace Kelly. The Comedians disc has one-on-one interviews with Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld before they were big stars and classic comics like Totie Fields and Jack Benny.”

Soundtrack of our lives
The songs you grew up with serve as a common bond, able to instantly link you to your generation, regardless of who you are or where you come from. For many, popular music is also like a soundtrack of our lives. You happen to hear a song from your youth and it’s like running into an old friend, the way it calls to mind people, places, and experiences you may have lost touch with. Now, thanks to Oldies.com there’s no excuse for losing touch with those favorite songs.



Click Here to Order Now!