Radio Drops #10: The Birth of Music Radio and the Top 40 Format

1951, Todd Storz and the 45 rpm Record

The birth of music radio and Top 40, the first radio format. The video runs 2:45.

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What the Jukebox Taught Radio

Here’s a little history lesson. Where did music radio come from? Before 1951 there was no radio format. Top 40 was the first, and Todd Storz put it on the air in 1951 in Omaha, Nebraska.

Ratings back then were much more accurate than they are today, and Todd noticed (how could you not?) that the Top 20 countdown he ran every week was the highest-rated time slot of his entire week.

Why a Top 20 countdown and not a Top 25? In 1948 several things happened. The transistor was introduced, and so was the 45 rpm record. A 45 comfortably held about three minutes of music, and the grooves were tighter, so the records were easier to scratch.

With no commercials, you could play 20 three-minute records in an hour. But most records ran about two and a half minutes, which gave you comfortably enough time for about 20 songs plus the commercials and everything else you needed to do in the hour. That’s why I think it was a Top 20 countdown.

Now, there are radio legends about Todd Storz noticing that in bars and diners, wherever people gathered, they played the same songs on the jukebox over and over. The waitresses, working there six to eight hours a day, used their nickels and dimes to play the same songs again and again. Nobody had ever done it before: nothing but music, 24/7.

Those early jukeboxes held between 50 and 80 records. I think Mr. Storz probably asked jukebox operators and found that half those records hardly ever got played, as people concentrated their coins on fewer than half of them. So you could play about 20 records an hour, and you needed to play them again real quick. Thus Top 40 was born.

In 1955 Elvis Presley released his first record and the rock and roll explosion began. By the end of the 1950s there was not a city in the United States without at least one Top 40 rock and roll radio station.