So now I've got 4000 plus songs in my Amazon Cloud ...

That's every song that made the Billboard Hot 100 from 1964 to 1969 and all are available for me to listen to on any device that favors the Amazon software.  Took almost four days to load them, by the way.

I'll be going through the list and pruning it...a LOT!...as time goes by. The tunes are only available to me and mine who have access to our Amazon account. Sorry.

But looking over the list, it occurred to me that the old Billboard Hot 100 was the "senior correspondent" for Top 40 Radio, which played the best of the best, the biggest hits from all of the popular formats, each of which had a chart in Billboard:  Pop music, R&B/Soul, AC/MOR, Country/Western, Show tunes, even occasionally Foreign/Ethnic.

A hit was a hit and if it caught the ear of any one of the several dozen music radio programmers who mattered across the country, it wound up with a place on the playlist and maybe an entry into the Hot 100.

Take a listen here to the History of Rock and Roll Time Sweep and see how songs from Kyu Sakamoto and Buck Owens and Bobby Vinton and the Four Seasons and Barbra Streisand and The Beatles and The Four Tops and Freddy Fender all came together over the years to create an amazing mashup of the greatest music ever.

Since the 1980's, formats have niched down into smaller and smaller "genres" representing smaller and smaller listener segments.  A Top 40 format, as described here would have no successful place on the radio. Older listeners, who actually might listen, have been tossed aside.  And that's okay. But we still have our CD's.

And our Clouds.