Billboard (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Billboard magazine was born on the 1st of November, 1894, in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a trade sheet for the people who pasted advertisements onto walls. Its first issues ran just eight pages and carried columns with names like The Bill Room Gossip and The Indefatigable and Tireless Industry of the Bill Poster. Nobody reading those early pages would have guessed that this scrappy trade circular would one day call itself the "bible" of the recording industry. How does a publication dedicated to wallpaper advertising become the arbiter of musical fame? The answer runs through jukeboxes and phonographs, through racial politics and corporate mergers, through a mail-forwarding service used by draft-dodging vaudevillians, and through a $500 buyout that kept the whole thing from collapsing before it had a chance to matter.

• 2. From Bill Posters to Burlesque

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  William Donaldson handled editorial and advertising from the start, while his co-founder James Hennegan managed production through his own printing company, Hennegan Printing Co. When editorial differences pushed the two apart, Donaldson bought Hennegan out in 1900 for $500, rescuing the publication from the edge of bankruptcy. On the 5th of May that year, he converted it from a monthly to a weekly paper, opened offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and Paris, and pointed the magazine toward outdoor entertainment: fairs, carnivals, circuses, vaudeville, burlesque shows. A circus section launched in 1900. More prominent coverage of outdoor events followed in 1901. The paper ran a "stage gossip" column covering entertainers' private lives, a "tent show" section for traveling performances, and a subsection with the remarkable name "Freaks to Order". Donaldson also published pieces opposing censorship, supporting what he called productions exhibiting good taste, and attacking yellow journalism. One of his most consequential decisions came in 1920, when he hired black journalist James Albert Jackson to write a weekly column devoted to black performers. Jackson was the first black critic at a national magazine with a predominantly white audience, and according to a book called The Business of Culture, the column both identified discrimination against black performers and helped validate their careers. Jackson's grandson later confirmed that Donaldson also established a policy against identifying performers by their race. Donaldson died in 1925, leaving a publication that had already outgrown its bill-posting origins but had not yet found its permanent home in music.

• 3. The Mail Route and the Star

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  Traveling entertainers in the early twentieth century had no fixed address, which meant they had no reliable way to receive mail. Billboard solved this problem in 1904 by creating a mail-forwarding service: the publication tracked performer locations through its Routes Ahead column, received letters on their behalf, and published notices in a column called Letter-Box to tell stars that mail was waiting. By 1914-42,000 people were using the service. During World War I, the address was accepted as an official contact point for draft letters sent to traveling performers. The service became one of Billboard's largest sources of profit and one of its deepest wells of celebrity connection. Even in the 1960s, when the service was finally discontinued, Billboard was still processing 1,500 letters per week, a measure of how long the traveling entertainment world had relied on it.

• 4. The Jukebox and the Chart

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  Billboard began covering coin-operated entertainment machines as early as 1899, and in March 1932 created a dedicated section called Amusement Machines. The jukebox industry kept growing through the Great Depression and advertised heavily in the magazine, pulling its editorial attention further toward music. The phonograph and radio were doing the same work from different directions. Billboard published its first music hit parade on the 4th of January, 1936. A Record Buying Guide followed in January 1939. In 1940 came Chart Line, which tracked the best-selling records, and in 1944 a chart specifically for jukebox records called Music Box Machine. By the 1940s the magazine had completed its transformation into a music-industry specialist. The number of charts it published kept growing after World War II as new genres emerged. By 1987 there were eight charts; by 1994 there were 28. The Hot 100, the chart of the top-selling singles, was introduced in 1958. When editor-in-chief Timothy White overhauled the charts in the 1990s, he replaced data from music retailers with figures drawn from store checkout scanners through a system called Nielsen SoundScan. The chart Billboard Arabia launched in 2023 and Billboard India in 2026 suggest the expansion is nowhere near finished.

• 5. Ownership and Upheaval

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  After Donaldson died in 1925, Billboard nearly went bankrupt within three years. His son-in-law Roger Littleford took command in 1928 and, as the source describes it, nursed the publication back to health. Littleford's sons Bill and Roger became co-publishers in 1946 and inherited the magazine in the late 1970s, then sold it to private investors in 1985 for an estimated $40 million. Two years later it sold again, this time to Affiliated Publications for $100 million. Under the resulting entity, BPI Communications, the company acquired The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, Marketing Week, and Mediaweek, and also bought Broadcast Data Systems, a firm that tracked music airtime. In 1994, Billboard Publications was sold to the Dutch media conglomerate Verenigde Nederlandse Uitgeverijen for $220 million. That company acquired the Clio Awards and the National Research Group in 1997, and paid $650 million to publisher Miller Freeman in July 2000. An attempted $7 billion acquisition of IMS Health in 2005 collapsed after shareholder protests; the company eventually agreed to an $11 billion takeover bid from investors in 2006. VNU renamed itself Nielsen in 2007, taking the name of a company it had bought for $2.5 billion in 1999. Nielsen's CEO Robert Krakoff restructured the organization and planned further acquisitions before dying suddenly in 2007. Nielsen held Billboard until 2009, when it was sold as one of eight publications to e5 Global Media Holdings, a vehicle created by Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners. Guggenheim Partners eventually bought out Pluribus, then in December 2015 spun the brand to its executive Todd Boehly. Billboard now operates under the Hollywood Reporter-Billboard Media Group, a unit of Boehly's holding company Eldridge Industries.

• 6. Editors, Lawsuits, and Reinvention

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  Timothy White became editor-in-chief in 1991 and shaped the magazine's voice until his unexpected death in 2002. He ran a weekly column promoting music with what he called artistic merit while criticizing music with violent or misogynistic themes, and his chart overhaul introduced scanner-based sales data. His replacement Keith Girard was fired in May 2004, and Girard along with a female employee filed a $29 million lawsuit. The suit alleged unfair dismissal intended to damage their reputations, sexual harassment, a hostile work environment, and financially motivated editorial compromise. Email evidence introduced in the case suggested that human resources had been given special instructions to watch minority employees. The case settled out of court in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. That same year, in 2004, Tamara Conniff became the first female and youngest-ever executive editor at Billboard. She led the magazine's first major redesign since the 1960s, credited to designer Daniel Stark and Stark Design. During her tenure, newsstand sales rose 10 percent, advertising pages climbed 22 percent, and conference registrations rose 76 percent. Conniff launched the Billboard Women in Music event in 2007. By 2014, circulation had fallen from 40,000 in the 1990s to less than 17,000, and editor Janice Min steered the magazine toward a broader celebrity and fashion audience. Tony Gervino, hired by Min despite having no music industry background, became editor-in-chief in April 2014 and was fired in May 2016.

• 7. A Global Franchise

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  The Billboard Music Awards were established in 1990, using sales, streaming, radio airplay, touring, and social engagement data drawn from Billboard and partners including MRC Data and Next Big Sound. The Billboard Latin Music Awards followed in 1994. Additional awards ceremonies covering R&B, hip-hop, digital entertainment, and live music have launched and in some cases folded over the decades. The international edition program has grown steadily alongside the awards. Billboard Japan launched in 2008 and Billboard Brasil began its first run in 2009. BillboardPH, the first Billboard chart company in Southeast Asia, was announced on the 15th of June, 2016. Billboard China launched in partnership with Vision Music Ltd. on the 12th of September, 2016. Billboard Korea was announced on the 13th of January, 2024. On the 23rd of September, 2020, Penske Media Corporation assumed operations of the MRC Media & Info publications, including Billboard, through a joint venture called PMRC. The franchise that began with eight pages about bill posters in Cincinnati now publishes editions from Arabia to Colombia, with Billboard India joining the list in 2026.