Things I've Learned Listening to the Radio All Day
Yesterday, I decided to listen to a mainstream radio station for 6 straight hours. I have never been a huge fan of the radio after the 21st century, so I decided to give it a chance. The mainstream station is a station that plays the same 10 songs on its play list from the same 3 artists. (I exaggerated a bit) This is a station that takes a perfectly good song and overplays it so that the next time you hear the said "perfectly good song", you feel like vomiting. This is the station that supports whatever that is seen "hot" now, and stomps its mighty influential feet on whatever or whomever does not need any more stomping on or any more camera poking. So without further ado, I will commence to share what I've learned about culture and people through the radio.
1. The Theme is Love
Write a song about love, and you'll have big money coming your way. Any aspect about the term "love" will do;
puppy love (see Miley Cyrus's 7 things),
cross-gendered love (I kissed a Girl-Katy Perry),
physical love (Cyclone-Baby Bash and T-Pain joint effort)
love of the self (This is Why I'm Hot-Mims).
Love to love, and the money will come flying out of our pockets and into your Pocketful of Sunshine. You will soon be herding fans by the thousands and cult parties would be thrown all over America for your cheap, less than 100 words song. Love is the key.
Synthetic Music
2. Make Sure You Have a Good Sync Machine
This is the age of technology. In order to get your name out there and onto a playlist, you must have a really catchy background theme. The age of singing and creating your own background music with "skills" is over. Can you play and sing like the Beatles? Forget it; the Yellow Submarine sunk a long time ago. It is time for great beats such as Soulja Boy's Crank That, and Flo-Rida's Low, to grab the reins and reign the music industry.
3. Can't Sing? Reason #2 Why You Need a Good Sync Machine.
Ahh. America, the land of multiple opportunities. If dogs cower whenever you sing, I have good news for you. You can still make it big by singing. This is, of course, not the case 2 centuries ago when electronic devices are unable to manipulate the human voice. Thus, you should seize every opportunity you have to take advantage of the wonderful technology offered to us. Generations of engineers slaved over creating and fine tuning this great machine to turn off pitch to on pitch, and squeaky voices to a strong and hearty electronic-ed! voice. Of course, you essentially slap the face of something called music, but that can be compromised of course, by the big bucks.
4. America the Beautiful, moreover
I keep in touch with the news regularly, but there is an issue that America is dealing with, so profound that even non-readers of the news should also be aware of. Americans are all affected by the not-so-subtle wave of an impending economic crisis. The people sitting in their little office cubicles 5 years ago playing Solitare and surfing on the web all day are now wary of being fired. In addition, it takes longer to retire. Give my generation a couple of decades, and we may have to wait until we're 90 years old to retire. With all this said, let us examine the entertainment industry which is...going strong! (applaud here) Here, we have on one hand, millions of people facing problems about job security, retirement plans, and launching into jobs, and on the other hand, people are paid to follow other people around and write down their daily agenda.
Hopefully you see a problem with this reality. Or, you can see it as an opportunity for you to get ahead and jump into the entertainment industry.
5. Opportunity for those of you with 5th grade Education
You don't have to have a multi-dimensional grasp of the English language to produce multi-million dollar singles. All you need is a one-liner, preferably something about love, to be repeated throughout the song 80% of the time. Then, wing two versus of non-sensical lyrics on top of a raunchy beat, and voila, you have a standard club smash hit.
I am a pretty economical and optimistic person, and I am happy to share these positive opportunities that the entertainment industry has to offer. If you need an English major to easily slap down some lines, feel free to fire me a message.