CHUM Chart

The CHUM Chart is a long-running Canadian hit parade countdown radio show, originally aired on Toronto radio station CHUM AM then later revived on its sister station CHUM-FM.

It 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. At the time of its retirement in 1986, it was 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. New editions of the CHUM Chart Top 30 continue to air weekly on CHUM-FM as of 2024.^[3]

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.^[4] 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.^[5]