Billboard (magazine)
American weekly music magazine
Billboard (stylized in lowercase since 2013) is a Manhattan-based multinational music and entertainment magazine published weekly by Penske Media Corporation. The publication group and miscellaneous media corporation provides music charts, news, video, opinion, reviews, events and styles related to the music industry. Its music charts include the Hot 100, Billboard 200, and Global 200, which rank the most popular singles and albums across a wide range of genres based on sales, streaming, and radio airplay. It also hosts events, owns a publishing firm and operates several television shows.
Billboard was founded in 1894 by William Donaldson and James Hennegan as a trade publication for bill posters. Donaldson acquired Hennegan's interest in 1900 for $500. In the early years of the 20th century, it covered the entertainment industry, such as circuses, fairs and burlesque shows, and also created a mail service for travelling entertainers. Billboard began focusing more on the music industry as the jukebox, phonograph, and radio became commonplace. Many topics that it covered became the subjects of new magazines, including Amusement Business in 1961 to cover outdoor entertainment, so that Billboard could focus on music. After Donaldson died in 1925, Billboard was inherited by his and Hennegan's children, who retained ownership until selling it to private investors in 1985.
The public source identifies “Billboard (magazine)” as american weekly music magazine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Billboard, magazine and American.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q485240. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013, 1894, 1900 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “Billboard (magazine)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.