Alternative/Modern Rock charts pre-Billboard?

[chadstevens]

www.mixcloud.com/soolaimon7/uploads/

I've been loving these Top 30 countdowns, but since there are charts dating back at least as far as 1982, I'm left wondering where they may have been sourced from.  I know the 1988 and later charts were sourced from Billboard, but I wasn't aware of anyone before that.

[mkarns]

Maybe the CMJ (College Media Journal) New Music Report? Says Wikipedia:

The company was started by Robert Haber in 1978 as the College Media Journal, a bi-weekly trade magazine aimed at college radio programmers[1] and became CMJ New Music Report in 1982.[2]

CMJ.com publishes [published?] top 30 lists sent to them by radio stations, which subscribe at a cost of a few hundred dollars a year. CMJ formerly published these lists in CMJ New Music Report, CMJ's trade publication.

[chadstevens]

That's what I figured, but from what little I saw of that publication, I've never known CMJ to publish a 30-deep chart of singles/tracks. All of their major charts were of albums. But they are about the only ones I know of with a vested interest in that music in that era, so I don't know who else it could be.



If Record Research ever updates Rock Tracks, it would surely make a natural extension of that chart's history in the way that Cashbox and Record World's charts fill in gap eras in Joel's Billboard anthologies.