By Nicole  Johnson

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You turn on the radio, and Safe and Sound greets your ears for what seems like the thousandth time today. You switch the channel and Katy Perry’s Roar begins to fill your car, twenty minutes after it just played. The next station is playing the same song.

What’s wrong with the radio these days? Don’t the station managers realize there there are more than thirty songs in existence? And when a good song happens to come along, they play it over and over until you can’t stand to hear the words Blurred Lines one more time.

I remember when Clarity came out, and everyone around me, including myself, went crazy for it. A few weeks later it was still a good song. But after three months of hearing that song once an hour, I wanted to tear out my radio. I realize that when a song is good, you want to hear it. But not thirty times a day. When a song is over played like this, the saying “too much of a good thing…” comes to mind.

Radio stations need to expand their range of music. Instead of playing the ten things that came out in the past month, create a variety from the past five years, playing a song once a day to keep listeners guessing what will come next. When you’re driving to work at six in the morning, you don’t want to be lulled to sleep by that song you’ve heard more times you can count, or worse, driven into a rage which endangers everyone on the road. This is why I have taken to playing my own ipod through a converter, resulting in a calm, energized, and stress-free morning. Isn’t that what music is supposed to do? Make you feel alive and happy and energized? Instead of ruining songs, radio stations should constantly provide you with new, ever-changing, exciting music that keeps you on that station.

After I realized the abuse that radio stations put great songs through, I gave up on the radio and switched to Pandora, which provided me with great variety, and a good knowledge of music. My favorite genre being indie pop, I loved listening to endless selections, knowing each one was safe from the radio, as it was not considered “pop.” And then it happened. Interesting, new music leaked into the radio, ruining songs like Royals and Radioactive.

It needs to stop. I don’t know where station managers and radio DJs got the idea that people want to listen to one song until their ears explode but it is one of the greatest crimes of our generation. The radio needs to leave some great songs alone before there are none left to listen to.