Should Music Have Age Rating or Not Final

In this essay I will answer the question on should music have and age rating. I will cover: the advantages to music having an age rating, the negatives to music having an age rating and what will be the affecting factors that would give a certain piece of music or a music video an age rating.

The reason for me choosing this topic was because I love listening to all kinds of music but sometimes I know that what I am listening to is not appropriate for me but I do not know this because it simply does not tell us if it has unsuitable language or the music are videos inappropriate and have abusive or unsuitable images in.

I will structure my essay by starting off with the introduction then writing a paragraph about what affecting factors would make a certain type of music have an age rating. After this I will proceed to right a paragraph on the positives of music having an age rating and the negatives of music having an age rating. After this I will write a paragraph on why music having an age rating probably won’t stop people from lying about their age and just clicking on the music. After this I will right my conclusion to the question “should music have an age rating. The aim of my essay is to find out if the explicit sign that you see on many pieces of music like Spotify or I-tunes is really doing enough to stop many children or adults clicking on the music that they know isn’t appropriate for them.

Get quality help now

Doctor Jennifer

Verified

Proficient in: Abuse

5 (893)

“ Thank you so much for accepting my assignment the night before it was due. I look forward to working with you moving forward ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

What challenges did I face: the main challenges I faced were time management and finding out whether a source I used was trusty. I found time management hard because we were asked by our mentors to do 45 minutes a week this was tricky for me because throughout the week, I found myself getting caught up in after school clubs and having to do multiple other homework’s. I responded to this by creating a schedule for when I did my research, when I would draft my essay, when I would finish the final product and when I would complete the presentation. I found finding whether a source was trusty or not hard because there were so many out there that I just couldn’t tell if they were trustworthy or not. I counteracted this by looking where they were from. For example, lots of sources I used were from colleges, but I only found theses because I delved deeper into my topic and did not just click on the source that came up first on the google search bar.

336550057721500In this paragraph I will talk about the affecting factors that would make a certain type of music have an age rating. The first point I want to make is that inappropriate lyrics and graphic or abusive music videos which have content in that have unsuitable imagery or language have a bad impact on the young adults and teens of the world. According to “Content Analysis of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Other Drugs in Popular Music” research, hip-hop and country music also are associated with negative messages. Destructive ideas subside to the embellishment of drug abuse, alcohol abuse and suicide. In many cases they attain positive association among teenagers and young adults. Many different studies have shown that teenagers and young adults who watch a lot of Rap, hip-hop and heavy metal videos featuring violence, sex or alcohol/drugs abuse are more likely to: act helpful towards their peers, treat women worse and take aggressive behaviour better. In a study teen aged 14-18 watching “hardcore videos” for 14+ hours weekly were found:3 times more likely to get into a fight with a teacher.

2.5 times more likely to find themselves under arrest

1.5 times more likely to drink alcohol, use drugs and get a sexually transmitted disease or venereal disease.

This work was taken from American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Emory University

In this paragraph I will talk about the positives if music were to have an age rating. Music should have an age rating because in the modern day many artists or groups talk about violence, drugs, alcohol, sex and many more bad things that is not good for your child. For you in statistics more than two thirds of songs featured on the Billboard one hundred number contained explicit lyrics this data was taken from 2017. According to Newsweek.com “our taste for explicit lyrics has grown” by an enormous size. Data shows that up until 2001, only five songs featuring explicit lyrics made it to the number one spot on the billboard 100. Whereas that amount has skyrocketed by eight-hundred-and-three percent since 1985. As said in the last paragraph music with inappropriate lyrics can be bad for teens. Another reason music should have an age rating is that when you are looking on Spotify or YouTube there is nothing except from maybe an explicit sign stopping or even warning you from clicking or listening to the music or music video this could be harmful to your daughter or son because as we saw in the last paragraph this kind of music would be harmful towards your child. On the website Debate.org “should there be an age limit on music” 70% of people thought that music should have an age rating and 30% percent of people said that it should have an age rating. The website I took this from was an online survey website where you could vote and debate in the comments about the question being asked. If music were to have an age rating it would positively affect us by stopping people getting drawn into things they shouldn’t be doing.

In this paragraph I will talk about the negatives if music had an age rating. The first point I want to make is that if you put an age rating on music it will take away your child’s freedom because they cannot listen to the music that they would like even if it did have some consequences. Their freedom would be taken away if music had an age rating because they would not be able to listen to the music they like. This is a negative because everybody should have a right to a freedom of choice. Another reason for music not having an age rating is because parents are in control and if they do not want their son or daughter watching or listening to a certain kind of music they can stop them and this leads me again to if it had an age rating it would be removing their freedom of choice. This would leave parents with a responsibility and would take away their time because of something not there monitoring their child’s activity on Spotify or YouTube because a music age rating/limit is in place. If music were to have an age rating it would negatively affect us by making people lie more often and not giving us a freedom of choice.

In this next paragraph I will talk about why if there were age ratings on music videos, they probably wouldn’t do anything.

With just one blink you could easily miss the rating that is being displayed on screen. This would be because there wouldn’t be any flashing image popping up on screen to warn you. And you also wouldn’t see a black card with the age rating like you would see if you were watching the start of a DVD or watching something at the cinema.

Additionally, most people going onto the internet to watch some form of music or to listen to music will have to tell the website or app you are using how old you are so that you can access certain material. This is bad because you can easily just lie and have access to many things that are not appropriate for you. This internet has no obstacles or barriers to stop you from doing this so it would most definitely be a big problem.

Conclusion

Overall, I believe that music should have age rating, but this does not mean that you cannot listen to the music because this age rating wouldn’t be stopping people because they can just lie to get around it. So I believe there should be an age rating but it would only be a visual guideline so if you are listening to music with the wrong age rating that is inappropriate for you, you know you probably shouldn’t be listening to it. So, in conclusion music should have an age rating but this should just be there as a visual guideline so as not to take away the person who is listening to its freedom.