Last week I climbed into my car only to notice that my brother had up and taken every one of our shared driving CDs with him to college. Was I upset? No, because I assumed that a seemingly unlimited source of tunes awaited me at the spin of a dial. I was wrong.

I don’t listen to the radio often, and when I do it’s generally KEXP, a radio station which plays an eclectic mix of songs that rarely repeat and seldom sound the same. Commercials are sparse and the amount of time spent discussing celebrity gossip is sparser. KEXP is not the kind of radio that I dislike. The radio that I can’t stand is the top 40, commercial loaded, same-five-songs-on-repeat radio stations that add nothing to the musical world.

The first and most obvious reason that these broadcasting stations have slipped into my bad graces is the repetition of so few songs. Now, I’m not one to question the musical genius of Flo Rida, but I will say that too much of anything can be a bad thing. There’s so much music worth playing that doesn’t get heard because air time is given away to the perfectly calculated ratio of commercials to top 10 countdowns so that the radio station will make the most money possible.

Not only is the radio swamped down by the same five songs, but those songs are about selling an image rather than musical merit. The goal of that music isn’t to express oneself or create something for others to enjoy, it’s to promote the dance or a catchphrase. These are the songs that get overplayed not because they’re amazing pieces of music, but because managers and record companies have swindled and dealt their cards right to the man standing behind the repeat button.

For example, you may have noticed T-Pain’s absence from all the hottest tracks this summer. As it turns out, it’s not because he resigned after Jay-Z came out with “Death of Auto-tune,” a proclamation that the age of manipulated voices and yelling your name at the beginning of every track was dead. In fact, T-Pain has been concocting his own I-Phone app that will spread auto-tune to those less fortunate than him. It’s called “I Am T-Pain” and allows you to sing into your I-Phone and hear an auto-tuned version of your voice, as if you really were T-Pain. He created a style and got on every hit, overplayed track and now he’s using those connections to sell his product. Maybe it’s good marketing sense, but it’s also blatant misuse of my radio time.

This behind-the-scenes canoodling results in a decline in creativity on the artist’s part because they’re not making music for themselves, but rather for the listener. In this case, the listeners are the masses of people expecting a certain sound and who will change the station if they hear anything else. There are producers whose soul job is to find that “sound” and teach the millionaire recording artists how to have it. It’s about starting a trend instead of creating art.

The lack of creativity goes both ways, too. As a listener, when you’re hearing the same music over and over again, you forget what a great song is to you. Great music is different for everyone; it’s part of what makes us individuals. It doesn’t matter whether your song of choice is by Jay-Z or Enya. If you’re not going through the process of finding it for yourself, you’re missing out on your own sense of good and bad.

DJs keep their jobs in order to encourage listeners to stick with their station and music. But in truth, it’s not their station or music at all. In reality, all commercial radio DJs are told what to play by their polls and ratings, and not by any opinion of their own. JACK FM doesn’t even have DJs. It’s basically just an iPod shuffle to everyone. It’s a perfect example of how little opinion or personal taste goes into modern commercial radio.

When the artists and DJs aren’t creating or expressing their authentic tastes and skills, listeners gain nothing and the point of music quickly becomes void. I for one blame this on commercial radio for enabling the greedy, marketing crap that has ruined the popular musical world.