Ever since I was young, I have loved magazines. The library in the small town I grew up in periodically (no pun intended) offered outdated books and magazines for sale, and I remember spending a good deal of my allowance on these cheap little treasures.

Even though the content in these old issues of Sassy, Seventeen and Tiger Beat was pretty much irrelevant by the time I got a hold of it, I always loved reading them anyway.

This fascination with magazines continues to this day, and is exacerbated by the fact that, as an arts editor, I feel obligated to keep up with what’s going on in the music and movie business. Okay, I guess I enjoy it, too.

So now I subscribe to the two biggest mainstream publications “the industry” has to offer — SPIN and Rolling Stone. By doing this, I figured I was getting the best, most comprehensive coverage of music and movies. Alas, I was wrong.

It’s not that SPIN and Rolling Stone aren’t entertaining. On the contrary — they are both very entertaining publications. It’s just that they both run stories on the exact same bands, people, topics and movies in every single issue.

A case in point is 50 Cent. I first heard of him in a Rolling Stone blurb and thought nothing of him. “Just another generic rapper,” I figured. Then in the next issue, there was a one-page story summarizing how he was born to a teen drug-dealer mother, sold crack by age 14 and was shot in the face.

Although this gave some depth to the newest face of rap, I was disenchanted to read almost an exact replica of the story in the same month’s issue of SPIN. Now, this kind of overlap isn’t necessarily uncommon, so I wrote it off.

Until, that is, Rolling Stone featured 50 Cent on the cover of a recent issue and wrote a three-page feature on — you guessed it — how he was born to a teen drug-dealer mother, sold crack by age 14 and was shot in the face.

All this, and he’s now all over MTV, VH1 and BET. When does it end?

I believe that the problem with the mainstream music industry today is repetition. Even if you halfway like a new artist, the second he or she produces a “hit” single, chances are radio stations, magazines and music television will cram that song down your throat until you never want to hear it again.

The White Stripes are a great example of this phenomenon. As I’m sure some of you remember, the Stripes were one of the headlining bands at 2000’s WSUM Party in the Park. Barely less than two years later, they were featured live on the MTV Video Music Awards, and no one could get “Fell in Love with a Girl” out of their head.

This is not the only example of MTV catching wind of a “new” style of music, sinking its music-television teeth into it, and making it a big mainstream hit. In fact, it seems this is one of MTV’s main goals today — seeking out “underground” movements, buying out the artists and turning underground into “the new cool.”

The new brand of “punk” music exemplifies this co-opting at its most severe. While many argue that bands like Good Charlotte, A New Found Glory and Simple Plan are not punk, the fact is, they are — by today’s definition of punk, anyway. The reason the definition of punk changed in the first place is what really needs to be looked at.

While punk as a “movement,” per se, has never really had an established definition, I think it’s fair to say that the originals would most likely not include the aforementioned bands in their idea of punk music. The Clash, Minor Threat, The Ramones — that is original punk music. And today’s bands sound nothing like that.

So how did this new “punk” classification come to be? It’s relatively simple, really. MTV (and other mainstream media) found out that people liked punk music. And if something can be popular underground, it can likely be toned down, sanitized and marketed so as to make it popular in the mainstream as well, bringing in the big bucks to the media that promote it.

The rest is history. Punk is the new cool, and stores like Hot Topic make it such that you, too, can sport the rebellious, hard-edged “punk” image.

What’s missing from this equation is the fact that some of us don’t like being bombarded with “the next big thing” to the point of being sick of it and wanting never to hear of it again. Wouldn’t it be better to let listeners, readers and viewers tell media what they want to hear and see, rather than the other way around?

In a perfect world, there would be no more potentially great songs ruined by too much radio airplay, no more co-opted underground movements and no more marketing ploys designed to play off teenagers’ need to fit in.

Too bad we don’t live in a perfect world.