20: The Countdown Magazine

[ulij20]

Anyone listen to this show?

I listen to it every single week. Although the chart gets weird occasionally, it has remained sort of stagnant of late (sort of like R&R's AC chart). No new songs have charted in three weeks, which Jon pointed out on this past weekend's show. I wonder if there'll be a chart shake-up in the near future.

With all the songs that have been staying on the chart forever, the year-end countdown (Top 20 of 2005) should be interesting. I have no idea what number one will be, but I'm thinking probably "Take You Back" by Jeremy Camp, since that song was #1 for many weeks and was on the chart for over 30 weeks. It was a victim of "early termination", though, meaning that it dropped from the chart from an unusually high position after dropping super slow for months. Apparently, Christian Radio Weekly, the magazine that supplies the chart, has some sort of a recurrent rule that nobody but the staff knows about because songs that are falling slow and then all of a sudden drop off of the chart - it just doesn't happen. Regardless of that, "Take You Back" is an excellent candidate for the #1 song of the year, as are other songs like "Held" by Natalie Grant and "Holy Is The Lord" by Chris Tomlin. I like it when it's a toss-up like that, instead of when there's only one possibility (such as "Live Out Loud" by Steven Curtis Chapman, which won the top spot of 2001 by a landslide).

Anyone else here listen to this show? (I know of at least one of you that doesn't )

[jcmf3]

I used to listen to the show when I was in Colorado, but since moving to Atlanta, I haven't figured out when it is on the radio.

[ulij20]

I heard it every once in awhile in the fall of 1990, when I was going to college (which was a Christian college), then in 2000. when I set my clock radio to Sunny 101.5 (in South Bend), the dial was sort of messed up and one Saturday morning in May, it went off and it was tuned to Pulse FM. 20: The Countdown Magazine was just starting so, since I didn't really have anything to do, I listened to it and forgot how great Contemporary Christian music was (in fact, IMO, it was even better than ten years before), so I started listening to the show religiously (no pun intended). Number one that week was "I Am The Way" by Mark Schultz. In early 2002, Pulse FM went off the air from the frequency that was tunable in LaPorte (their 96.9 frequency is right next to LaPorte's radio station, which overpowers it), so I sort of lost track of it, even though I did print the list out every now and then. Then, in September, 2003, when MercyMe's big hit "Word Of God Speak" was spending forever at number one, I went out driving every weekend near the end of the show to see if it was still at number one. Then, one day in 2004, I started going out for a drive to listen to the entire show (this was before gas prices rose to ridiculously high levels!). In October of that year, I hooked antenna wire to my stereo and found out that if I pointed it to the southeast (I think the transmitter is in Bremen, Indiana or thereabouts), it came in pretty good, so now I can once again listen to the show from home.