oldies76 said:
DavidEduardo said:
There were some charts published in Argentina (Prensario magazine) and they may have some saved... but there was no Top 40 there in the 60's.
A bit off topic here, but if the "Nueva Ola" mainly originated by the late 60's and early 70's artists from Argentina, then how could there not be Top 40 in say, Buenos Aires?
Many of those songs were published on 45's and sold in cities, like Lima back then. Radio had to play them in the originating country, for the popularity to arise. Just a thought.
The first South American Top 40 dates to December 5, 1964 and was Radio Musical in Quito, Ecuador.
Prior to that, pop music was featured in programs, mostly an hour or so, on stations; almost all programming in Latin America in the early to mid 60's was block programming just like it was in the US prior to the great rise in TV in the early 50's. TV was more of a mid-60's thing in Latin America, where a TV set cost several times the annual average salary... thus variety programming on the radio. And lots of drama and soap operas, which were the money makers.
Top 40 came first to Mexico, with stations like Radio Mil, Radio Variedades and Radio Éxitos in Mexico City converting to the format in the very early 60's... 1961 IIRC (I interned at XEJP and XERC in 1963 and they were both several years "in format" then). Pop music began around 1958, with covers of songs from the US charts.
The Argentine pop movement began only a little later. But due to the nature of Argentine radio where the stations that programmed music were block programmed in shows sponsored by record companies, there was no all pop station. Radio Colonia, from across the River Plate in Uruguay, had quite a few hours of pop by about 1966, and I listened to them a lot when I went on quarterly trips to Buenos Aires to pick up the latest releases. But there was no all pop station until well into the FM era, decades later.
Spain was the original pop music nation, with loads of material going back to the late 50s and most was not contaminated with covers of English pop songs. Spain had music stations in the early 60's, and in 1966 they had what may have been the first FM-only top 40 anywhere... Los 40 Principales, which still dominates and has "sister stations" in about 10 countries of Latin America today.
Most stations played a mix of local artists and those from other places. Stations made quite an effort to get the latest songs from the US, Spain, Mexico, Argentina and to some extent Chile. If you were in Colombia or Ecuador or Venezuela or Central America or even Peru or Uruguay or Bolivia, you could count on maybe a dozen or so local releases of value each year... I traveled about once a month to Mexico or Argentina to get music. I paid a flight attendant to pick up all the new songs in Madrid at "El Corte Inglés' music department, and went occasionally to Italy (San Remo Festival, etc) to renew contacts with the publisher of Musica & Dischi who sent me new releases monthly. I even went to Chile, Montreal, etc., to find new music... it was a major expense item and the core of the station in an era when there was little production and few people could afford records.
To lend perspective, the first real Top 40 in Puerto Rico, a highly Americanized US commonwealth, did not occur until 1968 when Mike Joseph was hired to convert WKAQ. Before that, WUNO was "sort of" Top 40 but with loads of programs and a very broad playlist that was more of an MOR than a pop format. Puerto Rico's "Nueva Ola" led by music producer Alfred D Herger, began around 1967. Again, very late.
If anything, TV shows patterned after American Bandstand were a big part of making Top 40 type pop music happen in much of Latin America... not radio.
