[Editor’s Note: In honor of Family Weekend, I hope that this commentary on the state of popular music finds common ground among Baby Boomers, aging hippies and their Millennial kids alike. Happy listening!]
Although school weeks at Grinnell are notorious for being both variable and unpredictable, one thing that has become weirdly habitual and expected is that my daily lift will consist of squatting along to “Rather Be,” benching to “Shake it Up,” tricep extending to “Boom Clap,” and lunging to “Break Free.” Because the weight room in the Bear’s Athletic Center plays Iowa’s “hits” radio, the entirety of Grinnell’s athletic community is sentenced to spending an hour each day contemplating why “today’s hottest music” is a lifeless conglomerate of twelve identical sounding songs from a pool of seven mediocre pop artists.
A potential reply from the hits stations themselves would be that they are simply catering to the preferences of their target demographic, the Average American Radio Listener, so quality concerns inevitably take a back seat. If this is indeed the case, the real issue is why the Average American Radio Listener has terrible taste in music, and why they insist on their preferences being played for months on end until they become interested in acquiring new preferences. In order to uncover the roots behind this phenomenon, we must first investigate the process of how popular preferences are formed.
Hits stations rely on initiatives like the “Top 9 at 9 P.M.,” where DJs encourage listeners to call in with song requests, and then play the top vote earners at a certain time, as indicators of which songs their audience currently prefers. DJs respond by giving these “hits” more airplay, which propels them to the top of popular music charts and solidifies their position in the seven song cycle. However, a defining characteristic of Average American Radio Listeners is that they spend very little time scouring music blogs for new releases or sitting at home watching music videos for hours on end. So realistically, the only songs they’re going to call about are the ones they’ve heard on the radio. As a result, touting “Top 9 at 9” or “Top 40” charts as measures of anything other than which of the six songs these uninformed callers are being force fed, prefer, is dangerously misleading.
In reality, this would be like reporting that Cheesy Gordita Crunches are “what’s hot” in the food industry after polling a population that has been fed exclusively McDonalds and Taco Bell what they want for dinner. Therefore, popularity is actually a function of which songs hits stations initially choose for a given cycle. For the most part, these cycles consist of a compilation of singles from commercial artists who can afford to incentivize stations to play their songs. And, in order to retain listeners and thus, the station’s profitability, DJs are forced to play the songs that other “hits” stations (who are using the same criteria for airplay distribution) are playing.
It isn’t hard to see how these forces, economic and otherwise, discourage serious experimentation or variety, and ultimately lead to a convergence of six bad pop songs being played on repeat. Therefore, one could argue the Average American Radio Listener has bad taste in music because the institution that should be serving as ambassador to the industry, is actually responsible for America’s serious lack of exposure to the content currently being produced with in it. As listeners, we have legitimate reason to be outraged, because implicit in hits stations’ claims that they’re playing “today’s hottest music” is that they are reflecting popular demand, not arbitrarily setting it. But given that “what’s hot” could be more accurately characterized as “what’s hot amongst listeners who have been given seven commercially incentivized options,” their claim is a gross misrepresentation.
Now, I’m not saying that every song hits radio stations play is bad, or that we should toss catchy beats and fluffy lyrics to the wayside. Especially because when it’s 3 am and you’re drunk off your ass, a Cheesy Gordita Crunch and “Wiggle” is about all anyone can ask for. What I am saying, is that in an industry where literally thousands of new songs are produced each day, repeatedly broadcasting seven mediocre ones, is an extremely low quality service.
The real service opportunity then, lies in one of music’s few barrier to entry, which is the time it takes to research the millions of tracks available, in an effort to locate quality. This is something that increasingly popular streaming services such as Beats and Songza have recognized, offering playlists crafted by experts that reflect a certain mood or genre. And since a Spotify or Beats subscription costs the same whether you’re utilizing the millions of tracks to bump Biggie or shriek along to Katy Perry, the absence of an economic edge responsible for the overexposure to commercial artists’ music, should help to eliminate the issue of mainstream being synonymous with utterly horrible.
As music patrons (and supposedly curious, intelligent, experimental college students), we have both the agency and means to accelerate this transition. Radio stations are simply behaving as rational economic actors who will respond accordingly to consumer pressures and demand. At present, hits stations that diverge even slightly from playing their competitors’ staples will often times collapse within the first few months. Therefore, it is our responsibility to reverse this trend.
So, don’t turn on the radio with the sole intent of affirming that there is no place you’d “Rather Be” four times over the course of an hour and a half. Stay tuned in even if the first five songs are ones you’ve never heard before. Hits radio may be stunting our exposure, but our silence on the matter has translated into consent. We must rise up and demand that the title “DJ” be reserved for someone who has sifted through Fakeshoredrive, Twitter feeds, and Soundcloud to find America some gems, instead of someone who presses “play” on a playlist of the twelve songs most statistically likely to satisfy the largest number of people.
And if, as a result, music does escape from the classic American quagmire of excessive commercialization, we can take pride in the fact that it was our generation who incited this change.