Rap and Lyrics, or the Decline of Music

My sister was blasting the radio in the car the other day (HOT 99.5 for you DCers), and I heard 3 rap/pop/whatever songs that sounded the same. I thought about it and realized hat Rap and Pop, with their "Band of the Week" phenomenons, were destroying music, while enriching usic companies, their executives, and the RIAA (who I'll come back to later).
The music industry has lately turned to publishing albums in small numbers, then if they sell well, publishing dozens of other albums that conform to the same mold. The more money they make, the greedier they become. New music artists see that the only way to get a record deal is to conform to a mold. Music is becoming product, much like food or TV has in the past 40 years.
Rap, and it's associated satellite genres, are causing the subject matter and ingenuity of music to decline. In Rap songs, the beats have become a standardized bass beat, with lewd lyrics in "hardcore" rap, and sweet-sounding, yet discriminatory lyrics in "normal" rap. When too many songs are produced that have the same beat and subject matter, they blur together, and music is just produced to add to this bubble of similar music.
When every radio station across the USA (they're all owned by ClearChannel*) plays the same song over and over, 2 times an hour, for 3 weeks, the song becomes popular among a large number of people. The studios immediately begin cranking out a large volume of similar music, and then what is essentially the same song is heard on everybody's iPod, Radio, and computer across the country.
The music companies earn enormous amounts of money doing this, and then pour that money into a little venture called the RIAA. This organization dedicates itself to stopping even the possibility of file sharing. They prosecute anyone they feel like, using the court system and their multi-million dollar budget to confuse their victims. The few who fight back are defeated by this mega-corporation. One woman was ordered to pay $224,000 per song because her daughter installed MP3 Rocket on her home computer, unknowingly sharing her entire music library with the world. They pushed through legislation which prohibited people from watching movies that they owned on heir iPods. The RIAA recently declared, out of the blue, that copying your CD's, that you own, to your computer or iPod constitutes stealing. But you can fight back. Go to the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and learn about the RIAA. Think about it. If a company can make law just by constructing a press release, what comes next?

*On the topic of ClearChannel Communications: They control what we watch, what we see, and what we hear. They own 1,100 radio stations, 12 XM radio channels, 30 TV stations, and countless billboards along highways and in cities. Many DJ's on late-night radio are just computer programs in Milwaukee. Think about it.