Wim de Lang:
How many people are involved with Oldies Project and can you tell us who they are?

Oldies Project:
At present there are some 40 people in various capacities involved in the project. They can be divided up into three groups. First of all there is the actual team, who are in overall charge of Oldies Project. Secondly there is the engineering crew, who provide us with technical and logistical support and thirdly there is a rather large (and still expanding) group of oldies collectors and music specialists from all over the world who regularly make all sorts of contributions to the project.

As Oldies Project is exclusively about music and absolutely not about personalities, there isn’t much I can tell you about the individual team members, except that most of them have some sort of broadcasting background. As far as the team is concerned, Oldies Project is and will continue to be a fun project, devoid of all pretence. For this reason the team members have decided early on that they would prefer to stay in the background. They simply feel it doesn’t serve any useful purpose to come forward as they only want to devote their time to the project itself without having to deal with all sorts of other issues.

To provide you with some more insight about the philosophy behind the Oldies Project, let me just refer you to the information about us on the Radio London website.

Wim:
Are they all English?

Oldies Project:
No. Although some of the people involved in the project are indeed English, most of the team members are from other countries.

Wim:
How did it all start for you?

Oldies Project:
Well, what can I say; it just happened as a natural progression to what we had been doing privately for some time. Initially the audio stream was only used by a small group of collectors around the world. In fact – and not many people know this – Oldies Project had been around on the internet for roughly a year before we finally launched the Beta version of the audio stream in December 2004. In the beginning we just played around with it without giving much thought to the possibility of going public. This all changed in the summer of 2004, when the group of collectors quickly expanded to such extend that we simply couldn’t facilitate them anymore on the original set up. Once we reached that point we started to discuss the possibility of making the music available to the general public in the set-up that exists today. It took some time and a lot of work to formalize the current set-up, but even now, at least in our own minds, we still are just playing around with it. The audio stream is still running in Beta mode and on private servers and we have never aggressively promoted Oldies Project in any way. I guess you could say all we basically did was create the facility, only to be left extremely amazed about the response it continues to generate.

Please understand that, contrary to popular belief, Oldies Project was never intended to be a conventional radio station. To this day we still don’t think of ourselves in that way either. Of course, like regular stations we play music, but that’s where the similarity ends. In our opinion, nowadays, radio stations in general are way too much about personalities, egos, listener peaks and money, to give the music the attention it really deserves. At most mainstream outlets the music is merely used as a tool to attract as many listeners as possible and thus generate advertising revenue. By itself there’s nothing wrong with that, but in our mind the fear of potentially losing listeners and the somewhat paranoid ‘play it safe’ mentality of the program controllers that goes along with it, deprives the public of the possibility to listen to much of the wonderful music that has been produced in past decades. One of the main reasons why most, if not all, mainstream oldies stations sound alike, is simply because they are all playing only those ‘safe’ songs that they believe will attract the most listeners. The Oldies Project output is a lot less restricted as we do not have to abide by a playlist imposed on the listener by a programme controller who (very often) is clearly too young for his job.

To illustrate my point, here are some figures; At Xmas 2005 we played over 1,000 songs released in Britain in 1965. In theory, we could have played far more, as in 1965 a total of some 2,700 singles were actually released in England alone. Out of all these records perhaps only some 300 made the charts, and most UK radio stations nowadays will at best play only the chart records and ignore the rest. Obviously the same happens in other countries as well. As Oldies Project is privately funded, we do not worry about listener figures and are therefore, completely free to play the music we want. As a consequence, our playlist is far greater than at most outlets. Rather telling in this regard is the fact that some stations even go so far that they try to get more listeners by advertising that they will only play a particular song once a day. Whenever I hear or read something like that, I can’t help but laugh, as at Oldies Project a song will not be repeated for at least six days. In other words, you can listen to Oldies Project non-stop, 24 hours a day, for nearly a week and still not hear the same song twice! In fact, if we played all the songs currently on the playlist without any repeats, you would have to listen 24 hours a day for several weeks to hear them all and the list still continues to grow. This goes to the heart of our philosophy, as Oldies Project was more or less born out of frustration about the repetitive and thus boring output of the regular oldies stations.

Wim:
The music you play is mostly from the pirate radio days. Are you all pirate radio fans?’

Oldies Project:
If you are asking whether the team members are so-called Anoraks, the answer is no. Of course, having listened to a lot of recorded output from stations like London and Caroline as part of our research, we like what the offshore stations were all about, but most team members just aren’t old enough to remember the pirate stations from firsthand experience. We do indeed concentrate on music from the sixties and seventies and obviously the offshore stations are closely linked to that same era. Therefore, it is somewhat unavoidable that our output is similar to what the offshore stations were playing, but as far as we are concerned there is no deliberate attempt to recreate or revive such a station. Had that been our intention, we would never have chosen the name Oldies Project.

The main purpose of our project is to demonstrate that there was a lot more excellent music in the sixties and seventies than is currently being played by other outlets and it seems that we are succeeding. We regularly receive e-mails and messages in our guest book from listeners who tell us that they thought they knew all the music of the sixties and seventies until they listened to Oldies Project. I guess the biggest similarity between the offshore stations and our project is that we share the same unrestricted freedom of choice to select the music we want to play and we therefore end up with the same overall feel.

Wim:
When I listen to O.P. I hear a lot of records I haven’t heard for ages, can you tell me something about the way you choose the records?

Oldies Project:
First of all, thank you for confirming that we are indeed achieving our main objective which is to revive the songs no longer played by other outlets. The selection process isn’t all that complicated. Although it does involve a fair amount of research, the songs are basically selected in much the same way as the offshore radio DJ’s did when the records were first released. Each song is judged on its own merits. If it was released as a single, either in Europe or the United States, if it sounds good and fits into the overall sound profile of the stream, it will be played, regardless of whether it made the charts or not. It’s really as simple as that.

Wim:
Are all the songs from cd or do you use vinyl as well?

Oldies Project:
Most tracks currently played on the normal Oldies Project rotation are indeed from CD, although we sometimes do use vinyl recordings as well. Unfortunately there still are a lot more songs we would love to add to the playlist, if we could find better-quality copies. Although far more tracks are available on CD than most people think, there also are a lot of songs that can’t, or won’t be released on CD, because of copyright restrictions or simply because the masters are missing. This becomes most obvious on our weekly Big L Fab 40 show for which we frequently have to use vinyl tracks.

Wim:
Sometimes I hear very rare records, are they coming from private collectors?

Oldies Project:
We have a large library ourselves, but we also do depend on private collectors to help us obtain some of the really ‘hard to find’ songs. In some cases, we also receive rare songs from the artists themselves.

Wim:
Do you have to clean up some of the rare tracks yourself?

Oldies Project:
The Big L Fab 40 frequently contains songs that simply cannot be found on any other format but vinyl. Whenever we need to use vinyl tracks we try to clean them up as best we can. Not all our efforts are equally successful though, as some vinyl tracks are of very poor quality indeed, but most of them we can restore to an acceptable level.

Wim:
One of the first things people notice is the very good quality of the stream, it never drops out, can you tell us something about the server and the equipment you use?

Oldies Project:
Perhaps the main reason for the lack of drop-outs is that, unlike most audio streams, we use our own servers and do not depend on a third-party provider. The credit for the quality of the stream goes entirely to our main engineer, Jelle, and to Alex, who runs his own web hosting company and is responsible for the server output. Without those guys there would never have been an Oldies Project to begin with and they continue to do a vital and amazing job to this date. Unfortunately, asking them for technical details is just as unlikely to be successful as asking a master-chef for his recipes. All I can really say is that they use the latest technologies to ensure the best possible output. They are constantly looking for ways to improve the signal, and in fact have only recently renewed all the equipment needed to deliver the signal to the main server.

Wim:
For me, and a lot of other oldies music lovers too, this project would be the most perfect radio station. Have you ever thought about setting it up as a real radio station on the air?’

Oldies Project:
This is a question which is frequently asked, and the answer to it is: no, but we’re not ruling anything out. If an opportunity would somehow present itself, and somebody made us an offer to relay the stream’s output over the airwaves, we most certainly would give it due consideration, but I don’t think we will ever embark on such a venture ourselves as it simply wouldn’t be practical and also wouldn’t tie in well with the basic philosophy behind Oldies Project. Besides, new technology is introduced every day, and we are convinced it’s only a matter of time before remote access to the internet will be just as common place and widely spread as using mobile phones is today. When this happens people will also be able to receive the audio stream on some sort of mobile device wherever they like, making the need for an on-air facility obsolete.

Wim:
How many listeners do you think you have?

Oldies Project:
We don’t really pay a great deal of attention to what happens on the server from day to day. For us, it is sufficient to know that there never is a moment (day or night) when nobody is listening. Having said this, I can tell you that every week several thousand different IP numbers, originating from some 60 countries, are registered by the server log and the numbers continue to grow, as do the hits on our website. Some listeners stay logged on for only half an hour or so, whilst others stay tuned in all day. The average listen time of all listeners combined normally lies between 2 and 5 hours a day.

Wim:
Well, last question. What are the plans for the near future with Oldies Project?

Oldies Project:
No idea! We never anticipated the response we are getting, nor were we prepared for it. We never really gave it much thought either. We will continue to add more obscure tracks to the playlist. Beyond matters relating to content, there are no immediate plans to expand our operation, but – as I explained earlier – we’re open to suggestions.

© Wim de Lang, 2006. Reproduced by kind permission of Hans Knot, and the author.