Almost every family in America owns a car. If not, everyone has at least ridden in one. With the car come a.m. and f.m. radio stations. These stations are broadcast to hundreds, even thousands of people every day and therefore directly impact the billions of worldwide listeners.
The radio has too much power over individuals in the music industry. Stations handpick those who they deem “worthy” of airtime and create for those select few huge fan bases. However, this leaves thousands of potentially talented artists in the shadows. After they are done helping out a couple of singers become billionaires, they ruin those same billionaires’ careers by overplaying theirs songs to the point where it make radio listeners insane.
Nowadays radio stations have a monopoly on the types of music and artists that become popular. They pick and choose what music to play, who then broadcast to their audience. That means you can only hear the music that a small group of people like instead of a wide variety of songs and genres. While some struggling artists are working hard and have better voices than most of the auto-tuned radio edits, they will never become famous – because they aren’t played on the radio.
For the “lucky” few that do get airtime on the radio, the results can be just as tragic. Due to the fact that radio stations are so selective about the artists and songs that they pick, they have a variety of about ten songs that play in a constant loop. The songs are huge hits at first, and their audiences want to hear more, but soon the same ten songs get old.
Take the song “Call Me Maybe” as an example. The first week it played on the radio people were talking about it being the song of the summer, and lots of teenagers downloaded it. However, after a whole month of incessant, high pitch squeaking on the radio the song lost its appeal and so did Carly Rae Jepson. Her entire status as a “rising star” was revoked and now anyone who says her name or refers to the lyrics of her song is immediately shunned.
I am thankful that the internet has made it possible for people to discover new music, but it is still very difficult to get to the same status without using the platform that radio provides. The truth is, the best way to get people to listen to your music is to trap them in a ten by four box on wheels while rotting in traffic on the highway with no other form of entertainment. Maybe I’d be OK with the radio if stations had better taste in music, but with all of the talent that is out there in the world, the radio has a knack for finding “singers” who sound like frogs even with auto-tune.
savannah • Apr 22, 2022 at 8:06 am
the people that listen to the radio might have the same feeling about that singer and can feel that person’s presence.
Kelley • Apr 15, 2016 at 11:15 pm
In reality, the pop radio stations are mainly owned by Clear Channel and the company controls what gets played, not the station itself. The station jockeys and managers actually have little say about what they play. It works the same way with country, rock, adult contemporary, and even classics/nostalgia stations.