What was the FM Radio scene really like during the rise and fall of disco?

Steve Dahl had a bone to pick with disco largely because he lost his disc jockey job when the station he worked for, Chicago 94.7 WDAI, switched from an all-rock station to an all-disco station. Unwilling to change to the new radio format, Dahl was let go from the station.

How many stations were really switching to disco? Was the popularity of the genre confined to certain geographic areas?

The below visualizations, published through Tableau, detail the genres being played on FM Radio in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia in the years 1973, 1976, 1979, 1980, and 1983. The data comes from the FM Atlas, published yearly by Dr. Bruce Elving who categorized each radio station in the United States with the primary genres that they were playing. The FM Atlases are available as PDFs online at the American Radio History page. 

Why these cities? Chicago was the scene of Disco Demolition and the famous uprising against the popularity of disco. New York had a very prevalent disco scene and served as the setting for the film Saturday Night Fever, which greatly affected the popularity of disco and who listened to disco. Philadelphia serves as a middle ground between the two cities, as well as a center for soul music sometimes called Philadelphia soul. Soul and Funk music came to be an important part of disco music as well.

Below the city graphs is another visualization, a line graph created in Tableau that details the rise and fall of music genres played on the radio from 1975-1985. The data is sourced from Billboard’s chart archives published on Billboard.com, specifically the Top 100 Hits for each year from 1975 to 1985.

See the below links to view the visualizations, and scroll further for some thoughts about how they might affect a critical understanding of what Disco Demolition was.

The Billboard Top 100 Line graph particularly illustrates that in 1979, disco did surpass rock music on the charts. It was not an illusion that disco was taking over. It’s also interesting to see that there was a rise of pop music that leveled off to about the same level of popularity as rock by 1985. Though the line graph does not currently continue past 1985, one can already infer the seeds of the music culture in America today, where some genres like rock and pop still rule, but without the kind of domination that one genre would typically have in the 1970s and 1980s.