Casey Kasem's Final Countdown (July 3, 2009)

This weekend, some remaining affilliates will be airing the series finale of Casey Kasem's countdown shows: American Top 20 with Casey Kasem, and American Top 10 with Casey Kasem. Affilliates chose which version to air.

Casey is retiring from his countdown shows to focus on other projects.

Some radio affilliates, plus Sirius XM radio, air Casey Kasem's first two decades of his American Top 40 countdown shows from the past. Casey Kasem's American Top 40: The 70s, and Casey Kasem's American Top 40: The 80s. These two are replays of AT40 shows from the respective decades.

Since his first edition of his countdown show, American Top 40 first syndicated through Watermark Inc with the July 4, 1970 Billboard survey, Kasem has become a legend along the likes of Wolfman Jack, Dick Clark, and Alan Freed, as well as an inspiration to future countdown hosts like Rick Dees and Ryan Seacrest.

Througout the years, Kasem has shown enthusiasm in the world of popular music, as he not only counts them down, he finds interesting things to do with the trivia about the people behind the music, the artists, the past chart performances, artists with the most #1 or #2 without hitting #1 on the pop singles charts, one-hit wonders, background about the songs, and more including long distance dedications, playing the past #1 songs from the Top 40 Archives from a decade, and recapping the top three songs of the previous week. In a way, since I discovered his show on 1360 KGB back in April 1977 by accident, he has somehow made listening to top 40 music interesting instead of just being played without learning anything beyond the name of the artist and the song.

The first affilliate of the AT40 franchise happened to be in El Cajon. The now defunct KDEO 910 was the closest AT40 affilliate to Los Angeles, which didn't have a station to air the show until later on.

Kasem hosted AT40 from 1970 until 1988. From January 1989 until March 1998, he was host of Casey's Top 40, Casey's Hot 20, and Casey's Countdown, syndicated by the Westwodo One Radio Networks.

In March 28, 1998, Casey got the AT40 name back from ABC and hosted the show syndicated by AMFM Radio syndication until January 3, 2004. He retired from that show because he was tired of competeting against his other two countdown shows. Seacrest succeeded him with the January 10 show.

In August 2006, XM Satellite Radio, now merged with Sirius Satellite Radio, began airing newly restored versions of the original American Top 40 radio show from the 1970s and 1980s. Premiere Radio Networks also started airing reruns of AT40 (dating from 1970 to 1978 & 1980-1988) in January 2007.

Before Casey's AT40 show. Dick Clark hosted a short-lived syndicated top 40 countdown show in 1963, but lasted less than a year. In 1981, he created The Dick Clark National Music Survey for the Mutual Broadcasting System, which counted down the Top 30 contemporary hits of the week, in direct competition with American Top 40. After he left Mutual in 1986, he turned over National Music Survey duties to Charlie Tuna, and took over hosting duties of another show, Countdown America, whose previous host John Leader had left to create yet another similar program, Countdown USA. By the 1990s, Clark hosted U.S. Music Survey, which he hosted up until his 2004 stroke.

Other countdown shows that came along include the long lasting Rick Dees Weekly Top 40, which included comedy segments. For a long time, Dees, Clark, and Kasem were competeting head to head against each other for countdown show supremacy.

When Casey left AT40 after the August 6, 1988 edition, he later surfaced on Casey's Top 40 on January 21, 1989. AT40 continued on with Shadoe Stevens with the August 13, 1988 edition, and that lasted until AT40 signed off in January 28, 1995. For six years, there were four countdown shows competeting against each other with Stevens, Kasem, Dees, and Clark, with Tuna's show possibly lasting into the 90s, making it five countdown shows for radio stations to choose from. Many stations dropped the AT40 show in favor of either Kasem's or Dees's countdown shows.

These pop music countdown surveys gave the listeners a reason why some songs get played more often while some others disappearred from the airwaves after a few weeks. The surveys showed how well they performed on the chart or how poorly they did. Obviously, the musicians want the songs to be in the top 10, and even number one, in order to be among the songs that keep on getting airplay for many months or years to come.

AT40 gave the listener an education about popular music, something that the public schools fail to do. With AT40, listeners got stories behind the music, who the people in the bands were, what songs from the recent past are still relevant, which current songs at the time were covers of earlier songs, music industry news of some degree, and what kinds of sounds of pop music were hot at which years. By listening to the successive countdown shows going from 1970 through 2009, you get an idea what phases in music came and went such as mellow, soul, glam rock, disco, new wave, urban country, synth rock, freestyle, new jack swing, grunge, hip hop, modern rock, electronica, and more based on what the overall top 40 charts actually sounded like. You get an overall feeling of what the mood of the music was at the time when you listen to a past top 40 survey of a given date.

While Kasem is hanging up his radio microphone, he leaves behind a 39 year legacy that was originally inspired by other radio countdown shows before him, except that Kasem added his own ten percent to make it a survey that's often imitated but never duplicated.