We all knew about the influence of the Swinging Sixties. In the British album charts, however, it is not about the decade, but the sexagenarian record-buyer. Duffy, the Last Shadow Puppets and the Ting Tings may hog the headlines, encouraging the media misconception that their core audience of media-savvy teenage tastemakers is all-powerful, but an improbably large tract of the album market in 2008 so far has been claimed by deeply unfashionable “heritage” artists in the autumn of their careers, and created by fifty- and sixtysomething record buyers.

This year, the “golden pound” has funded the most successful UK releases for decades by artists who were not so much low-profile as no-profile. They include the still-active British rock’n’rollers Marty Wilde (69) and Joe Brown (67), and the late Billy Fury, 25 years after his untimely death.

Motown ground-breakers the Temptations were back in the Top 10 in March, Liverpool beatsmiths the Searchers narrowly missed it recently, and reappreciated British rock melodians the Zombies have just made their first-ever album chart appearance, with The Zombies and Beyond, 40 years after they broke up.

All of those titles were released by Universal Music TV, a division of the world’s biggest record company, Universal. Last month, the catalogue division of another major label, EMI, steered an American heart-throb of almost 50 summers ago, Bobby Vee, back into the Top 20 with a new best-of. Last Sunday, the same label even saw that quintessential 1950s rocker Eddie Cochran nudge into the Top 40.

We’ve heard plenty about “50 quid man”, but he is generally perceived as a music-monthly-reading fortysomething, making repeated impulse purchases to replace his old David Bowie vinyl with CDs or even download equivalents. Here, we are talking about different consumers: much older, probably with even more cash to flash, rather out of the habit of spending it on music, but “marketable” via two immoveable fixtures in their lives: television and shopping.

“We did a lot of research last year about the physical market,” says UMTV’s managing director, Brian Berg, “to see if there was a market out there that maybe wasn’t being catered for. We found that in the 50-plus market, they’re aware of downloading, but they don’t really want to download. They’re happy to buy physical product, and they have disposable income.

“They love the music they grew up with, and they couldn’t find it easily. So, if you put a package together that they like, and tell them where to go and get it, be it supermarkets, HMV or the local store — if they still have one — they’ll go out and buy it.” If you think it’s a coincidence that you suddenly start seeing ads for such albums around Father’s or Mother’s Day, you reckon without the huge importance of what the industry calls the “gifting” market.

Some of these encores come, admittedly, in an album- sales climate that is subdued, if not actually depressed.

To look at it another way, however, nearly 100,000 Platters fans can’t be wrong. Hold on, just rewind that: the Platters? The Californian vocal group’s history of 1950s success had seemed so distant, and so completely overlooked by the media at large, that the pages it was written on were turning to dust. The quintet behind Only You and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes had not troubled the hit parade here for 48 years. Nevertheless, The Very Best of the Platters has becomeperhaps the year’s most unlikely Top 10 album. Not just for one week, either, but for three. Witnessing this incongruous title rubbing shoulders with Gabriella Cilmi and the Kooks was like watching Back to the Future in reverse.

It doesn’t matter that some of the material being compiled is “PD”, or public domain, having passed out of copyright with its 50th anniversary. Even though that means you or I could theoretically release pre-1958 material and sell it on a stall in the garden, the numbers prove that consumers like a package that is well designed and persistently advertised.

UMTV is also highly successful as a dance-compilation label, and has a partnership with the northern club specialist All Around the World, with whom it guided the German techno noisemakers Scooter to the top of the album charts recently. In this context, however, UMTV is responsible for the creation, release and marketing of catalogue material owned by Universal.

Its position as the market leader is thanks in part to the intuition of Berg, who has become known as a king of catalogue marketing during more than 30 years in the game, since the creation of the “20 Golden Greats” marque in his EMI days. Yet, in a world where not even the Platters can get back into the charts completely by chance, it is also down to meticulous research. “It’s a market that’s been pretty much ignored, so you go into it and find out what people want,” Berg explains. “It’s not the younger market, where you’re second-guessing and using A&R intuition. The research will normally be qualitative, in focus groups, the way it’s been done for more than 30 years. You recruit a research department and say, ‘This is the brief, this is the demographic, these are the artists we’re thinking about.’ ”

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