CHUM chart

The CHUM Chart was a ranking of top 30 (and, until August 1968, the top 50) songs on Toronto, Ontario radio station CHUM 1050 AM, from 1957 to 1986, and was the longest-running Top 40 chart in the world produced by an individual radio station. On January 10, 1998, sister station 104.5 CHUM FM, which airs a hot adult contemporary format, revived the CHUM Chart name for a new countdown show.

The CHUM Chart also aired as a television program on Citytv every Saturday at 2:00 P.M. until January 2008, when the show was discontinued after Rogers Communications gained control of the Citytv stations and replaced it with the JackNation chart, a show based on their Jack FM radio brand. The program aired a list of the most popular songs in the countdown, starting from No. 30, playing approximately half of them.

From the chart's debut in 1957 until the launch of the national RPM chart magazine in 1964, the CHUM Chart is considered Canada's de facto national chart due to its status as the single most influential of the various local Top 40 charts. After 1964, however, RPM supplanted CHUM as the definitive national chart, although within Toronto the CHUM chart remained more influential while RPM was initially viewed as an upstart competitor rather than a national complement.

The chart debuted on May 27, 1957, under the name CHUM's Weekly Hit Parade. The CHUM Chart name was adopted in 1961.

The chart was published for 1,512 consecutive weeks, and had 694 different number-one songs over the course of its original run. Its first number-one single was Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up", and its final number-one was Madonna's "Live to Tell".

In the week of March 30, 1964, The Beatles simultaneously held ten spots in the top 40, placing at No. 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 14, 29 and 39.

One band, Mack Truck and the Exhaust Fumes, managed to appear on the CHUM Chart in the mid-1960s despite not actually existing. In an informal experiment to test how accurate the chart reporting really was, program director Bob McAdorey placed a fake entry for a nonexistent song at No. 50 one week just to see what would happen, and was astonished when the song indeed started rising up the chart on the basis of listener requests and orders from record stores.

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