Top 40 (radio format)

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Top 40 is a radio format based on frequent repetition of songs from a constantly-updated list of the forty best-selling singles. It is also used to refer to record charts which broadcast a countdown of this many hits, such as the UK Top 40 and American Top 40.

The term is also used to refer to the actual list of hit songs, and, by extension, to refer to pop music in general. The term has also been modified to describe Top 50; Top 30; Top 20; Top 10; Hot 100 (each with its number of songs) and Hot Hits radio formats, but carrying more or less the same meaning and having the same creative point of origin with Todd Storz as further refined by Gordon McLendon.

The Top 40 format is now more commonly known as contemporary hit radio or CHR.

Contents

[edit] History

Although predated by the music marketing concept of the hit parade, the Top 40 radio format was created in response to the drift of USA mass media audiences from radio to television. With the loss of audience came the loss of sponsors and big budget radio productions, and since competing directly with the new visual medium was untenable, putting something on radio that wasn't available on TV became vital. Recorded music provided low-cost and fully produced entertainment requiring only segues between presentations.

Although hit music shows such as American Bandstand occasionally appeared, television wouldn't attempt to directly compete with Top 40 radio until many years later with the rise of MTV, the early incarnation of which was a cable television version of Top 40.

The original Top 40 radio concept as devised in the 1950s did not emphasize any one genre of music or set of artists, instead playing, literally, the top 40 songs that people in a given broadcasting area wanted to hear played. While this meant that the up and coming rock and roll genre was often a popular music choice, out-of-genre Top-40 hits included gospel songs ("Oh, Happy Day!" by the Edwin Hawkins Singers), patriotic songs ("Ballad of the Green Berets" by S/Sgt. Barry Sadler), novelties ("The Thing" by Phil Harris), and even the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Top 40 also spawned the first generation of star disk jockeys, whose between-song patter and connection with the listeners became as important as the songs themselves.

According to Eberley (1982, p.219) "The driving rhythms of rock fit snugly into the unity and consistency of Top 40. For if it was one thing that Top 40 compounded, it was unity - all components (commercials, public service announcements, the excitement) were compatible with the music. The Gestalt was greater than the sum of the parts."

As a format, Top 40 radio waned in the mid-1970s with the expansion of FM radio with its superior sound and more varied programming. Much of the popular audience moved to more sophisticated and targeted formats such as Album Oriented Rock. Radio stations began to specialize in particular types of music rather than playing current hits regardless of genre. The all-hits format has never completely died, however, and has experienced sporadic resurgences on the FM band, though seldom under the Top 40 name. However, the concept of a closely controlled overall sound for a station that originated with Top 40 radio is now dominant in all genres, basically unchallenged except by a few on-air broadcasters like WFMU, WNUR, and a number of World Wide Web Internet radio broadcasters.

[edit] Key contributors

[edit] Todd Storz

Credit for the format is widely given to Todd Storz, who was the director of radio station KOWH-AM in Omaha, Nebraska in the early 1950s. At that time typical AM radio programming consisted largely of blocks of pre-scheduled, sponsored programs of a wide variety, including radio dramas and variety shows. Local popular music hits, if they made it on the air at all, had to be worked in between these segments. Storz noted the great response certain songs got from the record-buying public and compared it to the way certain selections on jukeboxes were played over and over. He expanded his stable of radio stations, purchasing WTIX-AM in New Orleans, Louisiana, gradually converted his stations to an all-hits format, and pioneered the practice of surveying record stores to determine which singles were popular each week. In 1954, Storz purchased WHB-AM, a high-powered station in Kansas City, Missouri which could be heard throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, converted it to an all-hits format, and dubbed the result "Top 40". Shortly thereafter WHB debuted the first top 40 countdown, a reverse-order playing of the station's ranking of hit singles for that week. Within a few years, Top 40 stations appeared all over the country to great success, spurred by the burgeoning popularity of rock and roll music, especially that of Elvis Presley. A 1950's employee at WHB, Ruth Meyer, went on to have tremendous success in the early to mid-60's as program director of New York's premiere top 40 station at that time, WMCA.

[edit] Gordon McLendon

Although Todd Storz is regarded as the father of the Top 40 format, Gordon McLendon of Dallas, Texas is regarded as the person who took an idea and turned it into a mass media marketing success in combination with the development in that same city of PAMS jingles. McLendon's successful KLIF in Dallas, which went Top 40 around 1953 or 1954, soon became perhaps the most imitated radio station in America. It was the combination of Top 40 and PAMS jingles which became the key to the success of the radio format itself. Not only were the same records played on different stations across America, but so were the same jingle music beds whose lyrics were resung repetitively for each station to create individual station identity. To this basic mix were added contests, games and disc jockey patter. Various groups (including Bartell Broadcasters), emphasized local variations on their Top 40 stations.

[edit] Rick Sklar

In the early 1960s Rick Sklar also developed the Top 40 format for radio station WABC in New York City which was then copied by stations in the eastern and mid-western United States such as WKBW and WLS.

[edit] Bill Drake

Bill Drake built upon the foundation established by Storz and McLendon to create a variation called Boss Radio. This format which began at KHJ Los Angeles on the West Coast of the United States in the mid-1960s, was further adapted to stations across the western USA and then by American disc jockeys as a hybrid format on Swinging Radio England which broadcast from on board a ship anchored off the coast of southern England in international waters. At that time there were no commercial radio stations in the UK, and BBC radio offered only sporadic top 40 programming. Other noteworthy North American top 40 stations that used the "Drake" approach included KFRC in San Francisco; CKLW in Windsor, ON; WRKO in Boston; WHBQ in Memphis, TN; WOLF in Syracuse, NY; and WOR-FM in New York City.

[edit] Mike Joseph

Mike Joseph's "Hot Hits" stations of the late 1970s and early 1980s attempted to revitalize the format by refocusing listeners' attention on current, active "box-office" music. Thus, Hot Hits stations played only current hit songs - no oldies unless they were on current chart albums - in a fast, furious and repetitive fashion, with fast-talking personalities and loud, pounding jingles. In 1977, WTIC-FM in Hartford, CT, dropped its long-running classical format for Joseph's format as "96 Tics"; by the end of the year, the station was rated in the top five, having jumped from fourteenth place. The first Joseph station to use the term "Hot Hits" on the air was WFBL ("Fire 14", which played the same 14 songs over and over) in Syracuse, NY, in 1979. Then WCAU-FM in Philadelphia switched to Hot Hits as "98 Now" in the fall of 1981 and was instantly successful. Other major-market stations which adopted the Hot Hits format in the early 1980s included WBBM-FM Chicago, WHYT Detroit, WMAR-FM Baltimore, and KITS San Francisco.

[edit] Don Pierson

Don Pierson took the formats of Gordon McLendon, Boss Radio and PAMS jingles to the United Kingdom and Europe and subsequently revolutionized the popular music format of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC Radio).

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Mass Media Moments in the United Kingdom, the USSR and the USA, by Gilder, Eric. - "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu Press, Romania. 2003 ISBN 973-651-596-6
  • Music in the Air: America's Changing Tastes in Popular Music (1920-1980), by Eberley, P.K. New York, 1982.
  • Studying Popular Music, by Middleton, Richard. - Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990/2002. ISBN 0-335-15275-9.

[edit] External links

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