A History of Radio and Content, Part II: Jukeboxes to Top 40
7. Jukebox & The Rise of Top 40 Radio
As the leading manufacturer of 45 RPMS, RCA benefited originallyby the increased demand for coin operated jukeboxes. By the time the Seeburg Corporation introduced the first all-45 rpm vinyl music jukebox in 1950, three-quarters of the records produced in America went to jukeboxes. Jukeboxes had several advantages over radio: they received the newest songs first, and they played music on demand without commercials. While they are primarily associated with bars (or Juke-joints, where they often replaced the piano), they were even more popular and lucrative in restaurants, diners, military barracks, video arcades and laundromats. The diner wallboxes allowed an intimacy as you could choose one song while the person at the next table was listening to another–in a way anticipating the sonic privacy of the iPOD, but not divorced from the social dimension that was more characteristic of recorded music in mid-century America.
Juke-box owners could replace the least popular songs with new ones on a weekly basis. Record companies thus courted diner and laundromat owners at least as much as Disk-Jockeys. “Give this song a week or two.” Sometimes an overzealous record promotion man would be seen in disguise at a bar playing the same song over and over. But, if the song sucked, and enough patrons complained or left the club screaming with hands over their ears, the owner would still pull the plug. The jukebox had more to do with killing local live music than the radio had; this is when many pianos started gathering dust or being used for kindling (just ask the song-pluggers).
The jukebox could be used by the record labels to maximize profits without the aid of the radio. Music chart magazines like Billboard developed separate charts for jukebox play, disk jockey play and radio play during this time. Many songs became jukebox hits that weren’t played on the radio. For the first time, music radio had a potentially more populist electronic competitor–not TV, not Hollywood, not even the live concert, but the Jukebox. Radio DJS would hang out by juke-boxes during their down-time, and became avid readers of the jukebox charts. It was very trial and error; sometimes a juke-box hit worked on radio, sometimes it didn’t.
When Radio Disk Jockey Gordon MacClendon observed that teens in the 1950s were more drawn to jukeboxes than what TV and many radio stations were giving them, and that they tended to play the same song over and over, he came up with the idea of “Top 40 Format radio” which dominated the music industry for the next 20-25 years. If the traditional record industry was trying to use the jukebox to cut radio out of the profits, the radio industry fought back by becoming more like the jukebox.
1957 Seeburg Jukebox - News
Part II continues with the rise of the Jukebox through Top 40 rankings. As the leading manufacturer of 45 RPMS, RCA benefited originallyby the increased demand for coin operated jukeboxes. By the time the Seeburg Corporation introduced the first all-45
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