… there’s a certain sound that a jingle singer has …
[Description by contributor KM Richards]
In the early 1980s, it seems everyone was in the countdown show business. Drake-Chenault’s entry was The Weekly Top 30, hosted by their perennial “everything” announcer, Mark Elliott. Since Casey Kasem had the Billboard charts locked down, D-C had to settle for its own “exclusive countdown computer” calculation of the hits. A check of this first hour of the show for the week ending September 19, 1981 shows that they were never more than three positions away from any song’s position on the Hot 100, though  provided it was an upward mover.
Not content to just count down the hits, D-C managed to work in parts of its other syndicated programming, such as the feature that started the fifth segment of this hour, which appears to have been taken directly from their “Golden Years” specials. The Weekly Top 30 lasted only a few more months after this  until January, 1982, after which Mark Elliott was a frequent guest host on the show that started the whole countdown craze, American Top 40.