SuperOldies.com goes online this Sunday, November 2, 2003. The new Internt-only webcaster promises to play songs that entered the TOP #100 in the USA according to the trade magazine, CASHBOX, between Jan. 1955 & Dec. 1969. In addition, SuperOldies.com will play Canadian, UK and Australian hits & rarities.
I emailed a few questions to Shawn Nagy, the man behind SuperOldies.com. Here's what he said about his new stream.
Radio Guide: Is SuperOldies.com free - no strings? Or, are there upgrades?
Shawn: Absolutely free. I will take oldies-memorabilia-only related advertising soon and place their spot at the top of each hour ("this hour of uninterrupted oldies is brought to you by..." kind of like PBS does). Minimal advertising will be a relief to the ears. I'll be selling some oldies memorabilia on the site which will hopefully help cover costs. At the current time the station can serve 20 listeners at once. If there needs to be more, I'll have to charge more for advertising...which I hope there are buyers out there, but the expense is really pretty minimal.
Radio Guide: Tell me a little about you.
Shawn: My main income is through my musical group The Shackshakers - we do our fair share of oldies, and backing oldies artists at events. I do some club bookings and have assembled a group of "one-hit wonders" so to speak to do some oldies package shows for us in the new year. Most people I've mentioned the station to are surprised to find out I'm only 33.
Radio Guide: Why did you go with this format? Personal reasons?
Shawn: I have been working for 4 years on accumulating the charted songs and editing/restoring them so there is as little quality difference as possible. The vinyl songs have no cracks, pops, noise, etc. In case the quality of the stream goes higher, all of the songs will sound just as good.
As for the format, I LOVE the oldies and find that most oldies stations on the radio are now '60s & '70s, and don't play much of the '50s at all. They also only play a limited number of Top artists and their Top 10 songs. Anything under that doesn't get played!? There's another 80 charting songs that could be played from each month. So many charting instrumentals, and few get played besides the really familiar classics. A good example is a multi-decade charter like Connie Francis or Johnny Tillotson...30 or 40 charting songs and they play one or two if at all!
