You were expecting maybe Lawrence Welk?
This month, AARP launched a streaming Internet radio service on its website that's designed to help the organization's gray and graying membership stay clued in about what's happening in popular music.
And the surprising thing about the 18-channel service, which is free for members and nonmembers at www.AARP.org, is that it's by no means merely a stodgy service meant to soothe senior citizens as they ease their way into a Sinatrian senescence.
Sure, you'll find your Paul McCartneys and Bruce Springsteens - both recent cover boys on AARP: The Magazine - on the Classic Rock channel. And this month, a featured-artist channel is playing only the music of Paul Simon, the 69-year-old heritage act whose new mortality-confronting album, So Beautiful or So What, came out in the spring on Hear Music. The label is part of the Concord Music Group, AARP's partner in the Internet music venture.
But alongside those baby-boomer artists who are chronologically in step with AARP members - median age 65.8 - the streaming service includes Fresh Sounds, which specializes in au courant indie-rock artists such as Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., TV on the Radio, and Tune-Yards, the experimental and excellent one-woman project of Connecticut songwriter Merrill Garbus.
So when we use the word hip in relation to AARP, we're not only talking about something that needs to be replaced.
"We're looking across all genres of music that would best appeal to AARP members," says Concord Music Group's Marc Morgenstern.
"And we're making a link for people. We're creating an environment where people who have strayed from music can reconnect to it and make discoveries. For instance, if you love Aretha, check out the new Beyoncé album."
The service is curated by hipster-friendly streaming service Slacker.com. And it's part of a music focus that's modeled after Movies for Grownups, an initiative that AARP launched a few years ago and that gave Robert Redford a Hall of Fame award this year. (The 40 million-member organization used to be called the American Association of Retired Persons, but started going by AARP in 1999.)
Says Hugh Delehanty, the 62-year-old editor in chief of AARP media properties (and former music editor of People magazine): "The main attribute of our brand is trust. The AARP plays the role of trusted adviser. We give people balanced and informed information on health and money and Social Security."
