@theoldman
Hello:
I am going to offer a few search suggestions to try and narrow down you search issues. When you state oldies, what genre of oldies? As oldies is a broad term now in music. Do you mean golden oldies of say the swing jazz era? Or oldies from the WWII era of big band golden oldies, or maybe oldies from the rag time era of music? Or the oldies from the beginnings of rock 'n' roll like Chuck Berry and Elvis? Oldies is a tough nut to crack when it comes to searching.
Here, try these search options just copy and paste into the search window of the Spotify desktop app and hit enter on the keyboard, and look under ARTISTS, ALBUMS, and PLAYLISTS areas: spotify:search:jazz you can also use keyword searches and do this by year like this spotify:search:year:1920-1950
Here is some general information on using search terms to try and find the music you are looking for:
You must start your search like this spotify:search: and then you can refine your searches in Spotify by adding extra terms into the search box. Note: search terms are not case sensitive.
Search by artist
artist:Radiohead – lists all tracks by Radiohead
Search by track
track:"My Sound" – lists tracks with the name My Sound
Search by album
album:Loveless – lists the album Loveless
album:”Many Faces Out Of Focus” – use quotes when the keyword contains spaces
Search by year
year:1969
year:1989-2013
year:1989-2013 NOT year:1993
Refine your search with AND, OR, and NOT.
Kyuss AND Green – lists results with keywords ‘Kyuss’ and ‘Green’
Zeppelin OR Floyd -- lists results with keywords 'Zeppelin' or 'Floyd'
Metallica NOT Anger – lists all Metallica tracks except with the word ‘Anger’
Instead of using AND or NOT you can also use a plus sign (+) or a minus sign (-).
Further search options
genre: Displays music in the genre matching keyword. See the list of all genres, for example genre:blues, genre:"rock and roll".
label: Displays music released by the label matching keyword.
isrc: Displays tracks matching ID number according to the International Standard Recording Code.
upc: Displays albums matching ID number according to the Universal Product Code.
tag:new - Lists the most recently added albums. ‘Tag’ won’t return results for any other keywords.
You have to use a keyword combination like this for the search to work right and be fine tuned to what you are looking for, like this:
spotify:search:genre:blues
spotify:search:genre:jazz
spotify:search:genre:ragtime
spotify:search:genre:classical
You can also try doing search patterns along these lines as well. Using keywords as before, copy and paste into the search window and hit enter on the keyboard, note you will have to look under the areas of ALBUMS and PLAYLISTS here, but these are usually decent playlists created, also albums of note, and pointed out by the Spotify service that are of note here:
The sound of [blues]
The sound of [jazz]
The sound of [ragtime]
The sound of [big band]
The sound of [classical]
If you notice here under the PLAYLISTS section of each of these The sound of [genres], there are sub divisions of other styles of music here under the main playlist title, these can be clicked on and which will take you to other styles of music along these lines. The sound of [genres] substitute the word genres with the genre word of music desired being searched about i.e. classical, jazz, blues, rock, etc.
Hopefully this information will work for you. I know all of this might seem allot at first, but some of the power users on Spotify use these search patterns to get at what they are looking for.