Why The Most Popular (And Accessible) Songs On Radio Are About Love

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Take a look at your phone and glance over your playlist. Chances are that you have songs there by artists like Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Meghan Trainor whose songs are more or less focused on love. Whether be it about heartbreaks, young love, crushes and many more, these are the songs that we usually hear on the radio and thus these are the songs that sell. So what is it about love songs that just make us go gaga over them?

First and foremost, love is something that we are all familiar with. It’s a concept that everyone can relate to like it’s something that even children can grasp. However, to think of love as simple is a naïve way to see it. Love is very complex and no love can be said to be similar as to the other. We all have different interpretations of it and more or less, it’s something that we have a really hard time expressing despite us knowing the feeling all too well. As humans, we tend to look for explanations about a certain subject that we can’t fully understand. If we can’t find a concrete explanation, we just try to find people who seem to know what the subject is about. Enter people like Taylor Swift whose music revolves around love, love and yes did I mention love.

Calling Taylor Swift a love expert is somewhat far-fetched as she’s had a lot of bumps in her experiences with love. However, the difference between her and a usual girl in love is that she can express her thoughts coherently via song writing and she uses it as her number one tool to attract a huge following. Let’s be real, Taylor Swift’s career isn’t based on her singing abilities nor her musicality but rather with her song writing and her ability to take advantage of using love as a tool that binds everyone. She knows that love is a topic that we all have sweet and bitter memories about and guess what, she has songs for almost any type of situation that deals with them! She makes a complex topic such as love a much simpler one and we all enjoy simplifying things that we don’t understand thus explaining her meteoric rise to stardom.

Then there are artists like Ed Sheeran who oozes charisma with his musicality. He isn’t the most charming guy neither the best looking. However, he makes up for it by being so good in serenading his audience with his heartfelt songs to which some of his most popular ones are revolving around our favourite subject – love. I know a lot of people who are literally getting all flustered whenever Ed Sheeran songs play on the radio. They get this euphoric feeling of being in love despite the song being directed to someone else. That’s the thing with Ed and his music – he uses love to make the song a serenade to a specific person in mind but in a way he makes it accessible so that other people can relate to it as well. It’s as if you’re the one who he’s writing the song about, and that illusion is why his songs sell a lot.

One unorthodox example yet somewhat similar artist to those two mentioned is Meghan Trainor who is relatively new to the music scene. Meghan is a girl who flaunts her curves and has a strong feminist feeling with her songs. She’s someone who blew up in the mainstream music scene with her songs “All about That Bass” and “Dear Future Husband”. These two songs are contradicting to Taylor and Ed’s style of writing but it’s still tackling the same topic nonetheless. Instead of using love as the gushy mushy fuzzy feeling that we are all used to, she attacks the subject with her own spice by using love as a tool to propagate self-respect. In essence, her songs are still about love but it’s a different kind of love. It’s about loving yourself and giving yourself the credit that you deserve. It’s something that seems really new and fresh to the music scene but looking at it more; it’s still the same old same old but tackled in a different light.

So what is it about love songs that just make us go gaga over them? Critiquing these three artists and the success that they’ve achieved prove that love songs really do sell. Despite constant repetition, we just can’t get enough of them and it’s mainly due to love being limitless. Love exists in many forms such as love for our parents, love for our special someone, love for our pets, love for our jobs, and love for ourselves. Love is something that we are all capable of giving and thus it’s something that we all have a say in. The plain fact that these artists attempt to explain a portion of what love is allows us to have this connection with them. It makes us think that they’ve experienced the same things that we have. All in all, using love as a song makes the feeling that corresponds with it easily accessible to the audience which is why it dominates the music industry up to this day.