Since the bottom half of the American Top 40 countdown sucks so bad, why didn’t Casey Casem only bother with the Top 20? Could it be he needed the advertising over the full show to make the show profitable? Was he a slave to a greedy producer? What else could make a man suffer through such garbage when maybe only 3% rose from the dung heap into the Top 20? The majority of hits rocketed their way into the Top 20 immediately. So, what’s your theory?
I would guess he does not actually suffer through listening to all 40 or maybe even any of the songs
And if the song made it to the top 40 out of all the songs released, it can’t be that terrible, at least to the mass majority
“Top 40” was literally invented by Todd Storz for a radio station. Storz had been in the jukebox business and noticed that roughly 40 songs accounted for most of the jukebox revenue. Top40 became synonymous with rock radio (and incidentally, you could space out 40 songs and a little filler over three hours) so it made perfect sense to make a three-hour show featuring 40 songs.
Incidentally, since most DJ shifts also happened to be either 3 or 4 hours back in the day, running a three-hour show on the weekend effectively took care of a DJ’s day off.
The phrase predated Casey Kasem, and was a standard radio format during the 1970s, when I was a disc jockey.
There was money to be made by providing a three-hour show to stations in virtually every market. More money than providing a one-hour show. And listeners got to hear the newest songs as they came onto the survey, then follow them like a horserace.
Kasem didn’t have to listen to any of the songs. He simply helped write and then voiced the intros and outros, onto a blank tape. There are some famous outtakes of him. He had minions who then put his intros with the songs and distributed the resulting product.
I don’t remember how it actually got to radio stations across the country; this obit says it was shipped on reel-to-reel tapes. And I think there was a version sent overseas on LPs for Armed Forces Radio.
In the late 1970s, at least, it was being shipped to at least some US radio stations on LPs. The station I listened to AT40 on in Green Bay did a weekly giveaway of “every song from this week’s ‘America’s Top 40’.” A friend of mine won it one week, and the station sent him the LPs containing that week’s broadcast.
(Parenthetical: from '85 to '87, I was a DJ at my college campus radio station; we ran the “Doctor Demento” syndicated show. It, too, came on LPs, complete with commercials embedded on it. The intent was that the local station would run their local ads in between each side of the LPs.)
[QUOTE=I don’t remember how it actually got to radio stations across the country; [this obit]
(http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-casey-kasem-20140615-story.html) says it was shipped on reel-to-reel tapes. And I think there was a version sent overseas on LPs for Armed Forces Radio.
[/QUOTE]
We got it on LPs at AFN until 1988 or so. Then it started coming on CDs. Now it’s all satellite feeds.
This was simply not true. I think that very few songs (at least in the heyday of the Top 40 format, and AT40) went from “not even in the top 40” to “in the top 20” instantly.
For example, here’s the week-by-week charts from 1983. The chart position for Michael Jackson’s hit, “Billie Jean,”, week by week:
- 1/22/83 #47
- 1/29/83 #37
- 2/5/83 #27
- 2/12/83 #23
- 2/19/83 #6
- 2/26/83 #4
- 3/5/83 #1
SiriusXM replays old AT40 broadcasts from the 1970s on their Seventies station on weekends, and I’ll occasionally listen to it. It’s interesting to hear a song which would become a big hit premiere in the 30s, with Casem saying, “…in its first week on the countdown,” when no one yet would know how big it would become. But, yes, on the other hand, I also hear songs that I haven’t heard in decades, had completely forgotten about, and am astonished that they had ever been in the top 40. 
I don’t agree with the premise of the OP. There’s plenty of good stuff in the bottom 20 of the Top 40 that never reach the top 20. Just look at the charts of, say, the early-to-mid 90s, circa rock and grunge making a comeback. Much of that work that we define with the generation barely cracked the Top 40. (For example, I don’t think a single song off Pearl Jam’s 10 even made the Top 40. Nirvana had a bit better luck, with Teen Spirit hitting #6. “Come As You Are” only made it to #32. “About a Girl” seems to be the next one to crack the Top 40, and that peaked at #29.) There’s plenty of good songs in the bottom half of the top 40, and, in some time periods, I’d argue “better” songs if you’re not a fan of the time’s dominant genre.
I routinely listened to AT 40 back when I was in college. It was fun to hear the songs move up and down the charts. Made for a fun Sunday morning. Well, except for that long string of weeks my freshman year when “You Light Up My Life” was sitting at the top, for a record run. 
[Bolding added for emphasis.]
I think the reason no songs from Pearl Jam’s *10 *made the Top 40 is because they didn’t release any singles from the album. Radio stations were free to play whatever cuts from the album that were especially popular with listeners and videos (e.g., “Jeremy”) were made from some of the cuts.
As for the OP, the “horse race” factor was a big reason I used to pay attention to the Top 40 charts even if I didn’t like or was indifferent about the vast majority of songs. That changed once they began using SoundScan to track the songs in 1991. Under the old system, it was almost impossible for a new song to debut at #1 even if it had sold over one million copies a week and was being played every half hour on the radio. Now, it was common for songs to debut at #1 and/or yo-yo up and down the charts for well over a year. In fact, if you compare the Billboard Hot 100 charts from over the last year with the charts from any year before 1991, you’ll find there’s considerably less turnover in songs now.
But I had some of their singles. My favorite was the “Even Flow” single with “Dirty Frank” on the back. “Jeremy” had “Yellow Ledbetter” on the reverse.
ETA: Ah, I see what you’re saying. Now that I think about it, those were imports, weren’t they? ETA2: Yeah, looks like they weren’t officially released as US singles until 1995. I totally forgot about buying “imports” at the record store.
I’ll also add to my last post and mention that Billboard added songs that were album cuts (or “airplay only singles”) to their Hot 100 chart in 1998. This, by the way, was at a time when sales of singles were so low it was thought the format would be obsolete within a few years.
Out of curiosity, what is the reasoning behind releasing international singles off that album, but not domestic ones?
Actually, as a big fan of the “AT40” reruns from the 70s, the early hour is usually the best. You get stuff like the hardest funk, country crossovers, novelty songs, and all the songs that aired in just a few markets. Wouldn’t you much rather hear that then “Hotel California” the zillionth time?
You’re right about Todd Storz, who started the concept about 1953. His name was still associated with the format in 1958, when I worked as a DJ at a Wisconsin station patterned after WDGY in Minneapolis. We simply considered ourselves to be
A Storz Station" and we aired the WDGY playlist. As distinct from any of the other “Top 40 stations”, most of whom complied their 40-song play list from the Billboard and/or Cashbox top 100 lists.
Basically, there was a box with 40 records in it in random order, and the DJ’s just went through the box and played them over and over again. The idea of mixing in an “oldie” came in about the mid-60s. Before that, a previous hit wasn’t nostalgic, it was just stale.
By the way, my weekend shifts were at least six hours, sometimes eight. We took are of each other’s days off.
Listening to Casey Kasem on weekends on Sirius XM is both fun and frustrating. Lots of the 1970’s songs make me think “who liked this?” It is also interesting hearing the mix of pop, rock (not much), country, and ballads that showed up each week.
Are these LPs available to collectors? It would seem like there would be thousands of them available, but eBay just shows a few out there. Were you instructed to destroy them at the end of each week? or mail them back?
The 70s is an especially interesting time to listen to music from, because for most of the decade, there was no one single discernible “style” to the music (unlike the rather boring 80s). So you would hear all sorts of styles during the three hours. The list of #1s from a year like 1975 is just bazaar.
I really enjoy listening to the rebroadcasts of AT40 as well – I’m always surprised at the number of songs that were bona-fide top 40 hits that I don’t remember at all. Granted, some of them got to #40 or #38 and no further, but it’s a great way to find old music that’s new to you.
I wouldn’t know. I’m guessing it might be because a different company distributed the album internationally and they had a different policy about releasing singles. Also, assuming the same company did distribution domestically and internationally, perhaps the “no singles” provision only applied to the American release.
One thing I forget to mention in my last post is I’ve often wondered about the exact type of metric Billboard and the other charts used to measure a song’s popularity week-to-week. I’m aware they used record sales, radio airplay, radio requests, and (for a time) jukebox plays but, when they got done with the formulas and mathematics, was there a number at the end? The record charts aren’t like week box office reports or TV ratings where there are actual numbers (in form of dollars or viewers) attached to a movie or TV show. Thus, you don’t know how big a gap there is, for example between the #1 and #2 songs on any given week.