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I was thinking about something like this the other day. The sixties music is now forty years old. I was in my twenties in the sixties and there is no way forty-year-old music from that time, ie the 1920s, was anywhere near as popular then as sixties music is now. Maybe some Gershwin, and that was it. 'Old' popular music didn't go back much further than the music of the forties, such as early Sinatra and big band sound.

Rock and roll may, indeed, never die.

I was thinking about something like this the other day. The sixties music is now forty years old. I was in my twenties in the sixties and there is no way forty-year-old music from that time, ie the 1920s, was anywhere near as popular then as sixties music is now. Maybe some Gershwin, and that was it. 'Old' popular music didn't go back much further than the music of the forties, such as early Sinatra and big band sound.

Part of this may be the recent rapid development of compact, long-lived and robust data storage media. I mean, what media did they have for recordings in the 20s? Nowdays, the people who wish to listen to 60s music keep transferring that music onto newer media, "keeping it up" with technology as it were.

The sixties music is now forty years old. I was in my twenties in the sixties and there is no way forty-year-old music from that time, ie the 1920s, was anywhere near as popular then as sixties music is now.

Very true. Technology had a lot to do with that, though. Both actual music technology, like electric guitars and amplifiers, and other technologies like television and transistor radios, that reshape society. A transformation of technology or society could make us look on sixties music as the sixties looked on the twenties.

... there is no way forty-year-old music from that time, ie the 1920s, was anywhere near as popular then as sixties music is now. Maybe some Gershwin, and that was it. 'Old' popular music didn't go back much further than the music of the forties, such as early Sinatra and big band sound.

Well there was this guy...

I wouldn't say that sixties music is all that popular with the nation as a whole... most oldies radio plays a rigid list of 120 songs every day (and they have played those songs and pruned the list since the early 1970s, earning them the name "Moudly Oldies" instead of the more commercial "Golden Oldies").

"Classic Rock" radio stations (playing the 70s songs) started out playing those songs when they were new and when the next sound came along, they refused to adapt.

The nostalgic baby boomer market is large enough that those stations can retain listeners but there is a very large segment of killer 50s, 60s, and 70s rock that doesn't get radio airplay.

For me, these stations have killed the enjoyment I would have from listening to Dark Side Of The Moon because I could hear 3 songs from that album on the radio every day. Meanwhile songs from "Animals", "Meddle", or "Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" get no airplay. Even when a new best of or boxed set of Pink Floyd comes out, the stations don't use it as an opportunity to add some "new" cuts to the playlist.