American Bandstand

American Bandstand is an American television program that began as a local Philadelphia broadcast in 1952 and went national on August 5, 1957, built around teenagers dancing in the studio to the latest popular recordings while musical guests lip synced their own singles. Dick Clark became its host in 1956 and presented it for more than three decades. Its Rate a Record segment, in which studio teenagers scored new songs, became one of the program's most recognized features. The show gave many major recording artists, including the Jackson 5 and Aerosmith, their first national American television exposure, and its format of a regularly scheduled program built entirely around popular recorded music and dance directly influenced the music television programming, including MTV, that followed it decades later.