Keeping us company and singing along with us as we go about our business, the radio is a huge part of our everyday lives.

It plays today’s “hottest hits” and provides us with all the popular tracks, yet is the music that dominates our radio waves really the best?

I find that there is way better music out in the world that seems to get almost no recognition because it isn’t one of the repetitive club beats with the same lyrics about partying and getting “turnt.”

Plus even when the good music does make it to the radio, the stations play it over and over to the extent that it gets ruined.

I guarantee that Adele’s new song “Hello” will be overplayed, and then I will be sick of it which is such a shame because that is one of the only good songs on the radio.

My real question is, what happened to the quality music?

The majority of the songs that are “popular” are not even high-quality music.

They all have the same techno baseline and meaningless lyrics.

Then there are the few rare songs that are real.

However, what is truly sorrowful is that the best artists never get their deserved radio time.

Hozier, Halsey, James Bay, George Ezra and Vance Joy are all extremely talented artists who never or rarely get played at all.

These artists are just a few that are making true music with real lyrics.

What makes them so amazing to me is that they are original.

Why is that these artists never get played?

Has the population just lost their good taste in music?

Or is the radio not really playing the “best” music?

Many students at Dimond High School agree with me, and are also perplexed by these “issues.”

Riley Forceskie, a junior at Dimond, also believes the radio’s “hottest hits” are not great music.

“Honestly, like my opinion, is that I’ll listen to it, but I don’t really prefer it. I don’t consider that real music. It doesn’t really require that much talent.”

Denali Bunker, a sophomore at Dimond, said, “I think it all kinda sounds the same. I mean some of it is catchy, and I like some of it, but it all sounds the same. Plus they over play it a lot.”

Junior Raimey Drew said, “A lot of the songs are like commercial. They get repeated a lot.”

I totally agree. The radio extremely overplays the same songs, and it is just gets boring and repetitive.

Plus, then the songs are not good anymore. It’s not that the songs themselves have gotten worse, it’s that you hear them too much so they have run their course.

Sophomore Dru Keizer said, “I think it’s really repetitive, and the songs start out very good and then once they’re played a hundred times they suck after that. They get ruined and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with the songs themselves, just with the people who are playing them.”

Takuma Inoue, a freshman, said, “It kinda gets boring after a while. Sometimes I’ll hear like one song repeated one hour after it’s played.”

They exhaust the songs, but there are better songs and artists out there.

Forceskie said, “I believe that yeah. I mean they [the artists] just don’t have the connections to be as popular.”

Bunker said, “Like on my Spotify I have a bunch of unknown people who I listen to all the time, like Phoebe Ryan. She’s kinda like alternative. She’s the same, but different.”

Keizer said, “There are people who are incredible artists, but they don’t get any recognition. Jack Johnson is a very good artist and I like his music, but he doesn’t get any radio time that I know of.”

It seems to me that maybe that my generation’s radio music has gone downhill compared to that of the past.

Drew said, “Yeah, I would say that. They definitely have become more like pop culture. They aren’t as much looking at the songs as much as who’s singing them. It’s probably more about looks now than it used to be.”

Forceskie agreed saying, “It’s beginning to [go downhill] it seems like some music.”

There definitely are improvements the radio should make that I would like to see and others would too.

Inoue said, “I feel they should put more of a mix into instead of the same things over and over.”

Bunker said, “I think they should take more requests and take other people’s opinions more.”

Then Forceskie said, “They should add more versatility and different kinds of music to their stations.”

I completely agree.

It appears that people may start to reach out to other means of music such as Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and using their AUX cords with their own music.

I cannot say the future of current music looks very bright for me, but hopefully the artists with true talent and real messages will be heard and given the recognition they deserve.

It seems that the music that dominates our radio waves, is not the best of what the music world has to offer.