In 1958 a Los Angeles disc jockey put out a compilation of records that were already a few years old. He called it Oldies But Goodies: Vol. 1. It stayed on the Billboard chart for 183 weeks — three and a half years — and the phrase he used for the title entered the English language and never left it.
Art Laboe is widely credited with coining the phrase. He is also, through his company, its trademark registrant — read the flagged section below before going further.
The case studyThe man who named a feeling
Art Laboe was born Art Egnoian in Salt Lake City in 1925, served in the Navy in the Second World War, and had been on the radio since the mid-1940s before landing on Los Angeles airwaves in 1955, just as rock and roll broke. He founded Original Sound Record, Inc. in 1957 and put out Oldies But Goodies: Vol. 1 the following year.
What he had noticed was simple and nobody else had monetised it: records only two or three years old were already being treated as disposable, and listeners missed them. There was no word for that feeling. He supplied one.
The label had contemporary hits too — Sandy Nelson's "Teen Beat", Preston Epps's "Bongo Rock" — but the compilations were the franchise. Laboe kept broadcasting for another six decades. His syndicated Art Laboe Connection Show built an enormous following among Mexican American listeners, in large part because he read out dedications from families to relatives who were incarcerated. For a lot of people that programme was the only reliable way to say something to someone inside. He died in October 2022, aged 97, still on the air.
He did not invent nostalgia. He gave it a name short enough to print on a record sleeve, and then he owned the sleeve.
⚠️ Read this before you make an offerThe phrase is a registered trademark
OLDIES BUT GOODIES is a registered trademark of Original Sound Record Co., Inc. Filed 24 September 1984 for phonograph records and tape recordings, with further 1984 filings covering t-shirts, caps and hats, and board games.
We are a domain marketplace, not a law firm. We have not performed clearance and we cannot. We could not verify from public sources whether those registrations remain live, and that determination — along with whether any intended use conflicts — is work for a buyer's own trademark counsel, before a single dollar is spent on branding.
We are telling you this in the article rather than in the small print because it is the single most important fact about this name.
This is the exact mirror image of a case we covered earlier in this series. There, a court cancelled the We Buy Houses registrations because the phrase was generic — industry property, unownable. Here the opposite happened: a specific company used a phrase first, commercially, in a specific class of goods, and registered it.
The practical distinction matters. A trademark is a right to use a name for particular goods and services in a particular territory. It is not ownership of the words in the abstract. The registrations above cover records, tapes, apparel and board games. Whether a given use — a streaming service, a classic-car marketplace, a nostalgia publisher — falls inside or outside that is precisely the question counsel exists to answer, and precisely the question we are not qualified to answer for you.
The mechanismWhy this phrase does not age
Most names anchored to a moment decay with it. This one has a property almost nothing else has: the thing it refers to keeps moving forward.
In 1958 "oldies" meant 1954. In 1985 it meant the early sixties. Today it means the nineties, and within a decade it will mean the 2010s. The phrase carries no date. It describes a relationship between a listener and something they have outgrown but not stopped loving, and that relationship regenerates with every generation. A name built on a decade expires. A name built on a feeling about decades does not.
The dataWhat the numbers actually support — and what they don't
The headline statistic people reach for is that catalogue music accounted for 73.3% of total US music consumption in 2024, up from 72.7%, leaving new releases at 26.7%. It is a real figure from Luminate and it is genuinely striking.
It is also frequently misused, so here is the honest version. "Catalogue" means anything older than 18 months — not "oldies". Break the same data down by release decade and the picture changes completely:
| Release era | Share of US on-demand streams |
|---|---|
| 2020s | 49.6% |
| 2010s | 29.9% |
| 2000s | 10.4% |
| 1990s | 4.7% |
| 1980s | 2.2% |
| 1970s | 1.8% |
| 1960s or earlier | 1.4% |
Music from the sixties and before is 1.4% of streaming. Anyone selling you this name on the strength of "73% of listening is catalogue" is, at best, not reading carefully.
But look at what the table actually shows, which is better than the misleading version. The 1990s and 2000s together are 15.1%, and the 2010s alone are 29.9% and ageing into nostalgia right now. The sliding window is visible in the data. A brand built on "oldies but goodies" in 2026 is not a brand about doo-wop. It is a brand about the nineties — and in 2040 it will be a brand about the 2020s, without anyone having to rename anything.
The nameWhat 1997 buys you
OldiesButGoodies.com was registered in July 1997. That makes it 28 years old and comfortably the oldest name in this portfolio. Pre-2000 registrations of common English phrases essentially never reach the open market — they were taken early by people who kept them, and they change hands privately when they change hands at all.
It also passes the tests we apply to everything here: no hyphen, no numeral, no misspelling, and no spelling help required from anyone who has heard it once. And the phrase travels well beyond music — it gets applied to cars, films, recipes, sports footage and anything else with a pull backwards.
- A streaming, radio or podcast propertyThe direct read, and the one closest to the registered classes — clear it first.
- A classic film or television serviceDifferent goods entirely, and the phrase carries just as naturally.
- A collectibles or memorabilia marketplaceVinyl, diecast, arcade, sports cards — a category where the buyer already thinks in exactly these words.
- A nostalgia publisher or content brandNewsletter, YouTube channel, or commerce built on a generation's shared memory.
Honest limitsThe short version
The trademark question above is not a formality and it is not resolved. It is the reason this name sits second rather than first in our own internal ranking of this portfolio, despite being, on pure quality, the best name we have. If clearance comes back clean for a buyer's intended use, it is exceptional. If it does not, no domain is worth a dispute with an established rights holder.
The sale is the domain name only — no logo, no brand identity, no traffic history, no customer list, and no rights of any kind in the phrase itself. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here implies any affiliation with, or endorsement by, Original Sound Record Co., Inc., the estate of Art Laboe, or any related party. This article discusses their history for commentary and illustration.
OldiesButGoodies.com is available
Registered July 1997. Offers are made through the listing and transfers are handled through Escrow.com. Buyers conduct their own trademark clearance — please read the flagged section above.
View the OldiesButGoodies.com listing →Sources
- NPR — “Pioneering DJ Art Laboe, who coined ‘oldies but goodies,’ dies at 97” (October 2022)
- Variety — Art Laboe obituary and career
- Art Laboe — Original Sound Records, chart history and the Connection Show
- USPTO record — OLDIES BUT GOODIES, Original Sound Record Co., Inc.
- Luminate via MBW — catalogue vs current share of US music consumption
- Luminate 2024 — streaming share by release decade
Trademark information is drawn from public USPTO records as published by a third-party mirror and was not independently verified as to current status. It is presented as a reason to obtain clearance, not as a legal conclusion. Figures are as reported by the sources above and were current at publication. Domain valuation is not an exact science, and past outcomes are not a forecast of any particular result. BuyURLs.com sells domain names; it does not provide legal advice or trademark clearance, and buyers are responsible for their own.