Our Premise

Old people like music too.

It really is as simple as that. After retiring from the software industry I noticed that music streaming services were marketed exclusively to young people. I found this odd, and I thought to myself. Old people like music too. Right?

I felt like Apple Music would be an easy sell to people my age, so I pitched it to people I knew. Here was my pitch...

What if I told you, you could listen to every album you ever owned, and most, if not all, the albums you ever wanted, for about ten bucks a month.

The pitch is specific to older people, because we think of music in terms of albums, and for younger people that grew-up in the iTunes-era, or the music-streaming-era, they tend to think of music in terms of songs and playlists.

The people I talked to were definately interested, however when they looked into Apple Music it seemed to be all about contemporary music. There was a need for an alternate introductory path. So in October of 2021 I created the first version of the Classic Christmas Albums app.

Classic Christmas Albums was a curated collection of Christmas albums from the 50's and 60's. Apple Music contains so many albums, that finding Christmas albums of a particular era was difficult for my audience. Searches often returned comtemporary music, and curation usually involved playlists, which broke up the songs from the albums. As I've said, my audience likes to think of music in terms of albums.

Remember that Johnny Mathis album we used to play every Christmas?

We got the app in the store and it found some fans. The next year we updated it and put out a second app, Classic Exotica Albums for fans of authentic Tiki Bar music. An interesting thing happend when we went into Beta testing for the Classic Exotica Albums app. None of the Beta testers were able to test the sign-up process for Apple Music, because they had all signed up for it.

Because old people like music too.

- Randal Throckmorten Bachin
Founder Mid-Century Modern Music