We, the audience; (part 2) a touch of grey – boomers grow up and grow old (continued)

Nearly 20 years later, the leading edge of this key demographic faces turning 60, and the bulk are in their 40s. the generation that created the notion of youth as a separate realm of experience and knowledge now had children and even grandchildren of their own, yet still equate themselves and their peers with youth – the “baby” part of the “baby boomers.”

Not only don’t they want to grow old gracefully, they don’t want to grow old at all. “Baby boomers literally think they’re going to die before they get old,” said a pollster, confirming Mabe’s contention. A study done by the pollster’s research firm found that baby boomers defined “old age” as beginning at 85, three years after the actuarial table say the average American dies. When the boomers reach 85, we can only wonder where the concept of “old” will lie.

Most important for this series’ purposes is that music played such an important, often defining, role in the baby boomer experience that the boomers never stopped listening. Where the boomers’ parents might listen to Glenn Miller and get nostalgic, boomers go to see Creedence Clearwater Revisited and dance in the aisles.

“People like us, who grew up in the ‘60s, we took our music with us,” said Allan Pepper, owner of the late, lamented Bottom Line night club in New York. “When our parents grew up, with big band music and Tin Pan Alley, they put the music aside when they got married and raised a family. My generation kept buying records and kept listening.”

Beyond all else, baby boomers hold the economic reins in the U.S. (and around the world). There is no doubt that the approximately 78 million boomers still represent the 800-pound demographic gorilla. Demographer William H. Frey noted, “Now in middle age and their prime earning years, baby boomers’ economic clout is reaching its peak and, as in the past, the group continues to shatter the precedents set by earlier age groups: boomers reinvent… lifestyles consumer patterns.”

This, of course, made the baby boomers a prime target of marketing and advertising, and what better way to reach them than via rock and its icons? So in 2005, artists of unimpeachable musical and personal integrity like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney appeared in advertisements for Kaiser Permanente and Fidelity Investments respectively. In the meantime, the Rolling Stones, who had taken an alleged $15 million from Microsoft to appear in various promotions of Windows 95 (which in turn promoted the band’s song “Start Me Up”), appeared in ads for Ameriquest Mortgage, who also sponsored the Stones’ 2005 – 2006 world tour. The campaigns were, by all appearances, successful.

The baby boomers consistently bought more recordings over the past decade than their younger compatriots. In 2004, 40-year-olds and older accounted for over 37 percent of sales, versus a little over 30 percent for people 15 – 29 years old. In 1992, the difference was even more pronounced – boomers bought 42 percent of the music and 26 percent was bought by people under 20.

This predates downloading from the internet, and points to possible roots of the decline in prerecorded music sales. However, what happens when the music doesn’t speak to us, when no music that we hear lures us into the record stores? Could it possibly be that the nearly 20 percent decrease in CD sales over the decades past has more to do with the fact that boomers have less to go to the stores for than it does their children (and them as well) swapping music files? “The older demographic is missing,” Canadian Record Industry Association head Brian Robertson observed in 1996, “the one that has the most disposable income.”

Over the past decade it hasn’t gotten much better.