Stay eclectic to keep the spice in your relationship with music
Jeff Moses
Every time there is a DJ on campus I hear the same songs as if I’m at a bar on Mill or listening to the radio. Who in the world is the program director?
There is so much music in this world that to me it seems utterly insane that all we get to hear is the top forty every month.
I’m not trying to downplay the talent of top forty artists like Lady Gaga and who ever made that song “Party Rockers”, but I bet even the artists get tired of hearing their music on loop day after day.
Personally, my favorite bands and music change about as often as I change my socks.
I hear students almost every day tell me “I listen to all kinds of music.” Well if students are so eclectic and this top forty stuff is made for our demographic, then who’s listening to the top 40?
I suppose the music on top 40 is part of a circular system for ranking music. The radio stations play some songs. The listeners hear the songs and do not change the radio station. The station sees they have listeners and continue to play the same songs over and over.
So now the top forty has been chosen and it’s tearing up the radio. So then DJ’s say, “Gee that must be what the people want to hear.” Now the DJ’s are playing the same songs as the radio.
I know that for a song to get big, a lot of people have got to like it, but after hearing the same song a thousand times over I feel like I’m being forced to like it.
It makes me feel like top forty is chosen not by the amount of listens a song gets but by the amount of plays.
To compact my musical suffering, these same radio stations say “old” music that is sometimes more than a year old is now “new” music just because the artist who made it has not released any new music recently.
Here is an idea, why don’t you play some new music by a lesser-known band.
That’s the most fun part about music, finding new stuff to fall in love with.
There is an old Ugandan tune that goes “make new friends and keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.”
That is how I think people should feel about music.
