Large Volume Radio Compilations

April 15, 2007 1:15 PM

I'm looking to find out more about the very large, compiled sets of music that oldies (and presumably other formats as well) stations use.

When I was younger, a visit to a radio station, one which also trained high school DJs, had a long series of CDs on its CD rack. These CDs went A - Beatles, Brown through Credence, and so forth. Just this one set consisted of fifty CDs.

This made a lot of sense to me, because many of the oldies stations are playing songs from one hit wonders, and it wouldn't make sense to have a whole bunch of CDs where you only needed one track from the band.

1) What are these kinds of compilations called? Clearly, I'm not using the right search terms.

2) Where can I find listings of these compilations? Do they in fact have them for other formats besides oldies?

3) How can I, as a human being and not a radio station, purchase these items?

posted by adipocere to media & arts (4 comments total)

Most of them were compiled by the radio stations themselves; many were put together by the labels or (more often) publishing companies. But for the most part, songs are all from a digital database (much in the way you might store songs on a hard drive) and no physical/tangible version of the recording is used.

You can't purchase these and never really could. If they looked manufactured, it was because they may have been by the owners of the station (who probably owned dozens or hundreds of other stations) and they would have been very careful to make sure that they weren't sold to anyone, since the songs weren't properly licensed for sale at all, and no one wants to take on the Beatles et al!
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 2:55 PM on April 15, 2007

I don't know if it's any use, but there are torrents available with Rolling Stone's 500 greatest songs, a large proportion of which are popular 'oldies' tunes. Most of the artists are rich or dead, so morally it's not so bad :P
posted by Acey at 2:57 PM on April 15, 2007

Well, actually, I know these were not manufactured by the owners. I was told they were purchased from a library. Also, this was pre-download, so they weren't from MP3s.
posted by adipocere at 3:14 PM on April 15, 2007

The most prominent vendor is TM Century; they'll sell those libraries (I think they have 6 or 7 formats) on audio CDs, data CDs, or hard drives.

Google them.

They have mechanical relicensing rights from the labels for DJs and radio.

Unsurprisingly, they ain't cheap.
posted by baylink at 5:56 PM on April 15, 2007