The Hits Get Bigger As The Numbers Get Smaller

I remember growing up and listening faithfully to American Top 40. Sure, I was rooting for my favorite acts to rise in the charts, but let’s face it, the big appeal was the friendly voice of Casey Kasem himself dishing out all kinds of music trivia that we all filed away in our heads. While the show outlasted Kasem’s 18-year run as its host, it just wasn’t the same with Shadoe Stevens as host.

But it turns out you can go home again, after a fashion. Thanks to a complex and lengthy chain of changes-of-ownership of American Top 40 as an intellectual property, the show has wound up in the ownership of iHeartRadio – which devotes an entire 24/7 streaming channel to classic episodes. Not snippets of them, but the whole shows. Best of all, many of the gaps for commercials in the original shows are eliminated; only one out of three breaks is used on average, and usually only filled with iHeartRadio only runs promos for its own programming in one out of three breaks.

Heavily edited selections from American Top 40 have been available on Sirius XM before, but this stream is free – and the shows, if they’re edited other than to close up the unused commercial breaks, don’t sound like they’ve been conspicuously cut to shreds. It’s just you and Casey and the 40 biggest hits of a given week somewhere between American Top 40’s July 1970 debut through Kasem’s departure in 1988 – not a bad way to hit rewind on the years, at least in your ears.

Go give the stream a listen here.

(slightly nightmarish and yet original image generated by Hypnogram.xyz)