Contemporary hit radio (also known as CHR, Contemporary Hits, Hit List, Current Hits, Hit Music, Top 40, or Pop Radio) is a radio format that is common in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia that focuses on playing current and recurrent popular music as determined by the Top 40 music charts. There are several subcategories, dominantly focusing on rock, pop, or urban music. Used alone, CHR most often refers to the CHR/pop format. The term Contemporary Hit Radio was coined in the early 1980s by Radio & Records magazine to designate Top 40 stations which continued to play hits from all musical genres as pop music splintered into Adult contemporary, urban contemporary and other formats. The term Top 40 is also used to refer to the actual list of hit songs, and, by extension, to refer to pop music in general. The term has also been modified to describe Top 50; Top 30; Top 20; Top 10; Hot 100 (each with its number of songs) and Hot Hits radio formats, but carrying more or less the same meaning and having the same creative point of origin with Todd Storz as further refined by Gordon McLendon as well as Bill Drake. The format became especially popular in the sixties as radio stations constrained disc jockeys to numbered play lists in the wake of the payola scandal.
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary, hit and/or radio:
“Americans have internalized the value that mothers of young children should be mothers first and foremost, and not paid workers. The result is that a substantial amount of confusion, ambivalence, guilt, and anxiety is experienced by working mothers. Our cultural expectations of mother and realities of female participation in the labor force are directly contradictory.”
—Ruth E. Zambrana, U.S. researcher, M. Hurst, and R.L. Hite. “The Working Mother in Contemporary Perspectives: A Review of Literature,” Pediatrics (December 1979)
“Attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“The radio ... goes on early in the morning and is listened to at all hours of the day, until nine, ten and often eleven o’clock in the evening. This is certainly a sign that the grown-ups have infinite patience, but it also means that the power of absorption of their brains is pretty limited, with exceptions, of course—I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. One or two news bulletins would be ample per day! But the old geese, well—I’ve said my piece!”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)