Category Archives: Top 40

90 Years of Top 40 Music Revisited

Ten years ago, I started a project to document and listen to the progress of popular radio from its beginnings in 1925 to the present (well, 2014 at that time). I grabbed a database of Billboard annual rankings and created … Continue reading

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90 Years of “Top 40” Music: All That Jazz (1926-1929)

The way radio worked changed rapidly in the 1920’s. Two things served to organize the landscape of radio and to broaden its reach as a unified force across the country. In 1926, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was formed by … Continue reading

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90 Years of “Top 40” Music: It Begins (1925)

On Christmas Eve 1906, wireless radio operators on board ships from the North Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico heard something startling through their headphones. Normally, the radio men would listen through the static for the dots and dashes of … Continue reading

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90 Years of “Top 40” Music: Intro.

I have known for a long time about the seemingly seismic shift in music that happened the first time someone dropped the needle on a record of Chuck Berry’s Maybellene in 1955. In my head, people had spent hundreds of … Continue reading

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