While we rooted on our favorite songs on their way to the #1 spot on the Billboard Top 40, there were changes behind the scenes in the 1980s. ABC bought Watermark, the syndication company that Tom Rounds and Ron Jacobs formed in 1969. Casey Kasem and Don Bustany created AT40 for Watermark and Watermark distributed the show. With ABC owning Watermark, ABC had more leverage with radio stations on playing other-ABC owned radio programming. If they did not want to do it, then the station would lose AT40. Well, one of the stations that did not want to do it was KIIS - KISS- in Los Angeles and, in some ways, this is going to pave the road for the end of Casey’s tenure with the show that he created.

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