CHUM Chart

The CHUM Chart was a Canadian hit parade that consisted of 50 top tunes from May 1957 to July 1968, but in August 1968, the top 50 song list was reduced to 30 top songs until the final hit parade was issued in June 1986. Furthermore, CHUM was a Toronto, Ontario radio station of which the call letters were CHUM AM, from 1957 to 1986, and was -- at the time of its retirement -- the longest-running Top 40 chart in the world produced by an individual radio station.^[1][2] (It was later surpassed by Hamilton's CKOC, which produced a weekly chart for the 32-year period from 1960 to 1992.) On January 10, 1998, sister station 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 was considered Canada's de facto national chart due to its status as the single most influential of the various local Top 40 charts.^[3] 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.^[4]