Michael Mcdonald hadn't released a hit LP in twenty-two years when his collection of Motown classics rocketed to the top of the charts in February and scored him his first-ever platinum album. Now he's gearing up to release a second Motown CD, and retailers expect it to be one of fall's big winners.

It's shaping up to be a good season for nostalgia records by aging rockers: Rod Stewart will put out yet another standards album, The Great American Songbook, Vol. III. The previous volumes sold more than 2 million copies each and proved that people older than thirty-five can still be motivated to buy music.

"When you put an all-time-great artist with great material, magic can happen," says Tom Corson, general manager at Stewart's label, J Records.

But there's more to these success stories than the material. J Records and McDonald's label, Universal Motown, tried unique marketing strategies to reach an older demographic. The trick, they say, is letting consumers know the music is out there.

"When we do these records," says McDonald, "I always somewhere in my heart believe that if people could just hear the album, they would like it."

McDonald's manager, Ken Levitan, says that promotional TV time is a key factor in reaching older buyers, who aren't exposed to pop radio or MTV. For the first Motown record, McDonald's camp used live footage of the singer performing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" in an MCI commercial and placed identifying text in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, so it would look like a music video. "Within a week of the ad, sales shot up dramatically," Levitan says.

Corson notes that Stewart appeared on Oprah and Good Morning America to promote the Songbook records and drove sales with TV ads that allowed fans to order via an 800 number. "We have done a lot of research," says Corson. "And we found that this generation grew up with the record-buying habit. They want quality music, but they buy less than ten CDs a year."

Baby boomers are in many ways the ideal record buyers. "They're people with money," says Don Van Cleave, president of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, a retail organization that represents mom-and-pop shops. "These customers don't download and burn; they just stop by their local record store and pick it up. It's a hard market to reach, and it's expensive to reach them with mass advertising. But when you do reach 'em, it's ka-ching!"