Cashbox (magazine)

Cashbox, also known as Cash Box, is an American music industry trade magazine, originally published weekly from July 1942 to November 1996.

Originally, no indication of which version was the biggest seller was given, but from October 25, 1952, a star was placed next to the names of the most important artists.

Cashbox also printed shorter jukebox charts that included specific artist data beginning in spring 1950.

Archivist and record historian Joel Whitburn published his first research book based on the Billboard Hot 100, which made that data the "Bible" for official historic chart positions.

Perhaps the final straw for Cashbox came on December 12, 1992, when the Top 100 chart reported the number one song as "The Letter" by Wayne Newton.

In 2003, the former Cashbox Magazine became involved in a murder trial after police in Nashville, Tennessee, made an arrest in a 1989 cold case.

He reportedly was looking to introduce more scientific and transparent methods of determining chart positions, when a year into his job, he was gunned down in the street late one night on Nashville's famous Music Row.

Prosecutors maintained the killing was in connection with a payola scheme where record promoter Chuck Dixon paid Cashbox employees for favorable chart positions and other publicity.

[3][4][5][6] Cash Box was reinvented as the online-only Cashbox Magazine in 2006, with the consent and cooperation of the family of Albert, the late president and publisher of the original edition.

Bruce Elrod is the owner and remains the registered agent for Cashbox, which is now operated from Ridgeway, South Carolina.

In 2014, Whitburn's Record Research Inc. published a history of the Cash Box singles chart data covering October 1952 through the 1996 demise of the original magazine.

[9] The Swem Library at The College of William and Mary[10] maintains the archive of the original print editions of Cash Box magazine.

The print editions were digitized in collaboration with the Internet Archive, via a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources.