The 1960s was the decade radio got loud. Top 40 radio reached peak excitement, Britain’s airwaves were stormed by pirate ships, and in America an almost forgotten band, FM, quietly turned into the home of a whole new kind of radio. If the 1950s saved radio, the 1960s gave it attitude.
Top 40 at full speed
By the mid-1960s, American Top 40 stations were polished machines. The best-known example is “Boss Radio”, the tight format consultant Bill Drake created for KHJ in Los Angeles in 1965. Drake cut the DJ chatter, shortened jingles, and kept the hits coming with almost no dead air. Other stations copied it across the country.
Big-city AM stations like WABC in New York reached millions of listeners at night, because AM signals travel much further after dark. A teenager hundreds of miles away could pick up the same hits as kids in Manhattan.
The music helped. The British Invasion, led by the Beatles from 1964, Motown’s run of hits from Detroit, and the surf and folk-rock booms gave Top 40 an extraordinary run of songs.
Britain: pirates, then Radio 1
In the UK, the BBC still offered only limited pop music, a hangover from the 1950s. In 1964, Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a ship anchored just outside British territorial waters, where UK broadcasting law did not apply. Radio London and others followed. Millions of young listeners tuned in to non-stop pop and a lively, American-style presenting style.
The government responded with the Marine Offences Act of 1967, which made it illegal for British companies and citizens to supply or advertise on the ships. Then it gave the audience what it wanted anyway. On 30 September 1967, the BBC launched Radio 1, its first pop station, and hired many former pirate DJs. Tony Blackburn, who had been on the ships, presented its first show. The full story is in our article on pirate radio.
America: FM finds its voice
FM had better sound and could broadcast in stereo from the early 1960s. Few people owned FM sets, though, and owners often just repeated their AM programmes on their FM stations.
Then the FCC changed the rules. In the mid-1960s it began limiting how much an FM station in a big city could simply copy its AM sister. Suddenly FM stations needed their own programmes, cheaply.
Into that gap stepped what became known as underground or progressive radio. In 1967 in San Francisco, DJ Tom Donahue started playing long album tracks, deep cuts, and whatever he thought was good on KMPX, at a slow, conversational pace. It was the opposite of Boss Radio, and it fitted the album-based rock of the time perfectly. It laid the ground for FM’s takeover in the 1970s.
Radio and a turbulent decade
The 1960s were full of news: the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the Moon landing. Television brought the pictures, but radio was where many people first heard the news, especially on the move. Transistor radios carried bulletins into workplaces, schools, and cars. Soul and R&B stations, and the DJs who ran them, became important voices in Black American communities during the civil rights era.
What the decade left behind
Two opposite ideas of music radio came out of the 1960s, and they are still arguing today. One is the tight, hit-driven, high-energy format that dominates commercial radio. The other is the curated, personality-led, “trust the presenter” approach that lives on in specialist shows, college radio, and stations like BBC 6 Music. Most good radio today borrows a little from both.