‘Why defend a system like Top 40, which everybody knows is suspect’, asks author Eric Weisbard in Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Culture. Well, for one, to remedy a lack of critical attention that has been given to musical centres and mainstream popular culture. Through an in-depth exploration of pop music through Top 40 and format radio in the decades leading up to the end of the 20th century, Weisbard argues that format radio created multiple publics for which listeners and artists could challenge the norms and expectations of identity categories. Radio formats created ‘multiple mainstreams: distinct, if at times overlapping, cultural centers’ (p. 2). Within the rival mainstreams propagated by the format system, sounds were divided by age, gender, race and region, establishing a cultural pluralism at the heart of the mainstream.

The book is rooted in a cultural studies tradition that advocates the progressive and political nature of popular culture. From this perspective, Weisbard challenges the tendency to frame rock (and its subgenres) as a force of authenticity and supremacy over popular or mainstream culture. Citing recent debates and questions about rockism and poptimism, Weisbard critiques our affinity for identifying with genres over formats. After all, formats are a means by which to reach listeners.

Top 40 Democracy is broken down into five chapters (plus an Introduction) that are each organised around a particular radio format. Each format system is explored through a performer, record label or radio station. By delving into specific examples – such as the ways in which black identity remained a dominant concern through the music of the Isley Brothers and the Rhythm and Blues format, and Dolly Parton and a format-conscious country music that was open to women's ambition – Weisbard effectively demonstrates the dynamism of formats against the more rigid categories that demarcate genres of music. Channelling Simon Frith, Weisbard emphasises that genres have rules, there are ‘genre worlds’. By distinction, ‘Every format, every station on the 1970s radio dial, offered a choice not between mainstream and underground but between rival mainstreams, operating in a way much as cultural studies has long described subcultures: refashioning the center to serve their needs’ (p. 20). The chapter on Elton John, for instance, contrasts the restrictive nature of rock and its glam offshoot – ‘even a cohort of androgynous rockers claiming pop as a theatre of the absurd proved confining’ (p. 166) – with John's ascension of Top 40 radio that facilitated an inclusive public that made space for ‘all of what John had suggested about liberation’ (p. 171).

A most fascinating chapter is the book's fifth, which profiles the rock radio station WMMS in Cleveland (‘The Buzzard’). During the years between 1974 and 1986 Weisbard charts the evolution of a successful AOR (album-oriented rock) radio format by delving into primary documents including files kept by WMMS programme director John Gorman, coverage in trade magazines, and interviews. From this emerges a rock radio format removed from elitist claims of rock authenticity. Sources and methods are clearly laid out and used to tell a fascinating tale of a radio station defining and redefining rock radio. The chapter's commitment to radio is a welcome contribution to a work that explores critical issues in popular music studies through radio formats.

Readers will certainly get a sense of how radio formats have been influenced by other technologies. Format radio is described as an ‘on-air jukebox’ and the role of television in establishing formats is a point that is nicely emphasised throughout the book. However, there is perhaps room for a more pronounced account of the establishment of the format system in relation to radio as a technology and as an industry. Freeform radio is a recurring point of comparison that runs throughout the book, yet a more definite account of how freeform radio shaped, and was shaped by the format system would add a compelling dimension to this chronology of rival mainstreams.

Towards the book's conclusion emerges a provocative counterpoint to the widely accepted sentiment that the Telecommunications Act was inherently detrimental for American radio and popular music. Many scholars would agree that diversity and localism over the airwaves is only restricted as ownership is consolidated in the name of neoliberal capitalism. Weisbard, instead, urges readers to consider how, even after the act, into the 1990s and 2000s, format radio has been a positive and progressive force that has offered ‘a female audience a place to rock out’ and accentuated ‘the precarity of postindustrial masculinity’ (p. 233). Those who are prone to viewing the format system as a means to commodify audiences will likely be sceptical of this assertion, yet a major strength of Top 40 Democracy is its commitment to complicating the power dynamics between music industries and listeners. It repositions the often dismissed musical centre as an important space for the agency and identity of both musical performers and audiences.

Format radio's ability to connect with listeners and their social needs is a function lacking from ‘newer’ listening services and technologies, such as Pandora and Spotify. The book's final chapter, one that is well-situated in recent scholarship in media and communication studies (convergence culture and the digital music wars, for instance), makes this point clear as it accounts for the ‘placeless markets of the Top 40 formats and their intimate publics offered a vital, diverse center, a feeling of home’ (p. 264).

Hit songs contain the stories and lives of people working through the cultural, political and social issues of a particular time and place. As Weisbard convincingly concludes, hit songs are not Quarter Pounders.