Popular Music Essay, Research Paper

Popular Radio

These days you get into your car, flip on the radio, and what do you hear? A barrage of fake music. Lets name just a few to familiarize you with what I am speaking of: Back Street Boys, N’ Sync, Brittany Spears, 98 Degrees, Christina Agulera, Jessica Simpson, the list goes on and on.

Where did this surge of teenybopper music come from? Well, it has always been around, yet I don’t think it has played such a role in popular music like it does today. Groups like New Kids on the Block and Minueto were some of the first “boy bands” and Paula Abdul and Madonna were among the first “female teen superstars” in the music modern music world. Now how did music like this basically dominate the industry? Look at the market you are dealing with. Young males and females who are usually in families that have the money to spent to make their children happy. Look at the other groups you are dealing with in the music market; college students who spend all their money on school, food, and refreshments, eighteen to thirty-five, starting to have a stable way of life, worried more about mortgage payments and paying off student loans than buying frivolous things like CD’s, 35+ buys CD’s very infrequently, and the range of music that the 35+ group listens to varies so much that there is no single type or group that thrives off this group. The focus on the children’s market is how these bands prosper.

I just think that big business has just taken so much away from the music these past few years that we are now surrounded by manufactured bands who’s music means absolutely nothing to the artists that sing it. For one instance ABC had a special just a few weeks ago called “Making the Band.” This show displayed how a record label will pick out the “perfect” group of young guys that will appeal to this female audience. It went on to show the trials and tribulations about being young and famous. This display just made me absolutely ill.

All I could hope for is parents in the future to show their children a little more culture than what is placed on the table for them on TV. Beauty plays too large a part in society, and I am talking physical beauty, not musical talent-beauty. If children actually listened to the music, instead of watching the videos on MTV, I think there would be a large shift in the younger buying market.

What is in store for music in the future? No one really knows but I could predict that there will be a “new wave” of teenybopper style groups coming out soon after this wave dies out. Once this flush of young people start to grow up who knows where their music preference will fall. I hope, again, that as they mature, their tastes in music falls out of the materialistic music, back into the real art form, singer songwriters who actually know what they are singing about and feel their music from the inside.