Casey and the Top 40
So Casey Kasem is retiring. Another one of those guys that you grow up thinking will always be there, but all good things come to an end. Casey was an icon of my growing-up years when I followed the music charts more closely.
It bothered me more than I expected when I discovered about ten years ago that his program had changed from a Top 40 to a Top 20 show. One of the problems for a station carrying a show like Casey's Top 40 is that it looks awkward if the station doesn't play some of those songs the rest of the week. Is forty too many current hits for a station to be worrying about? I never would have thought so. One of the stations I sometimes listened to growing up, WLS out of Chicago, was worse than most about overplaying the current top 10 repeatedly, and even they put out their own weekly top 40 chart in those days. But it got worse after the wave of consolidation that started in the 1990s, and local radio gave way to corporate radio. I'm guessing that the corporate program directors couldn't handle keeping 40 current hits in the rotation while maintaining the level of repetition they wanted. Given the aforementioned awkwardness of carrying a countdown show without covering all the songs on it, there had to have been some push-back for those programs to shorten the list to 20.
Now that Casey has "retired", I would like nothing better than to see him turn around and do the show his way, as a podcast. But I suspect royalty/intellectual property issues would throw a monkey wrench into that plan.
It bothered me more than I expected when I discovered about ten years ago that his program had changed from a Top 40 to a Top 20 show. One of the problems for a station carrying a show like Casey's Top 40 is that it looks awkward if the station doesn't play some of those songs the rest of the week. Is forty too many current hits for a station to be worrying about? I never would have thought so. One of the stations I sometimes listened to growing up, WLS out of Chicago, was worse than most about overplaying the current top 10 repeatedly, and even they put out their own weekly top 40 chart in those days. But it got worse after the wave of consolidation that started in the 1990s, and local radio gave way to corporate radio. I'm guessing that the corporate program directors couldn't handle keeping 40 current hits in the rotation while maintaining the level of repetition they wanted. Given the aforementioned awkwardness of carrying a countdown show without covering all the songs on it, there had to have been some push-back for those programs to shorten the list to 20.
Now that Casey has "retired", I would like nothing better than to see him turn around and do the show his way, as a podcast. But I suspect royalty/intellectual property issues would throw a monkey wrench into that plan.