Tom Rounds was an American radio broadcasting executive, founder and chief executive officer of Radio Express in Burbank, California.
11 Facts About Tom Rounds
1.
2.
The period of 260 hours awake was attained while Tom Rounds was sitting in a department store window display.
3.
Tom Rounds became a regional celebrity following the stunt, and eventually rose to lead the station as program director.
4.
The Fantasy Fair produced by Tom Rounds is considered the first rock festival in history, preceding the more well-known Monterey Pop Festival by one week.
5.
Tom Rounds is acknowledged as being among the first to focus exclusively on the use of cinematography and music together in the form that is ubiquitous among major music acts, the music video.
6.
Tom Rounds led the company to successfully produce several dozen "artist-promoting films" for acts such as Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf and The Animals, working with many record companies to produce the early videos.
7.
Tom Rounds included Ron Jacobs, and with him Rounds continued to be involved with the promotion of large scale music events in markets associated with Bill Drake.
8.
Strawberry mogul Tom Driscoll was involved in the formation of another of Rounds's businesses.
9.
The most widely recognized of the programs Tom Rounds headed at Watermark was American Top 40, which featured the team of announcer Casey Kasem and producer Don Bustany.
10.
In 1990, Tom Rounds announced the introduction of American Top 40 syndicated programming into the Soviet Union, adding that country to the list of seventy where the program was heard at the time.
11.
Tom Rounds continued to head the company, which claims on its website to have established relationships with over 5,000 radio stations in 140 countries, until his death following complications from surgery on June 1,2014, at the age of 77, two weeks before the death of his former associate Casey Kasem.