I enjoy the radio. I have a few stations I’ll cycle through at home and in the car. But all nonprofit/college /etc.
Most US commercial radio is very bad. I don’t really understand why the playlists are so small, and why they don’t even occasionally play lesser-known songs by the big acts. Like, why don’t classic rock stations play deeper cuts by Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, etc. instead of the same hit singles over and over for decades? How can that be what listeners want? People who work in retail environments with a repeated playlist usually say they hate it for obvious reasons.
It’s as if those TV stations that show The Office and Seinfeld every night showed the same five episodes every week.
Yeah, for a long time I thought I disliked Rush because I only heard "Tom Sawyer" and "Closer to the Heart" on the radio. Turns out the best shit doesn't get airtime.
At least my hometown classic rock station would do a bunch of Zeppelin at 10pm, so I got exposed to their broader range.
A large chunk of people turn off/change the station on anything they don't like, which may be because of even slight unfamiliarity. I remember myself being this way when very young. Even today playlist radios sometimes have popular tracks in the format that I really hate, and this can also cause me to switch. This is even worse if that track is sure to be played 10+ times a day...
Anyway, this unfamiliarity switching is presumably a big deal for profit. Also, if you switch to a station and you're not hooked, this is also a problem: and a for-profit radio will irritate new listeners anyway with ads. There's a cycle in my local area (in Europe) of radio stations that were a little more adventurous, even formed with staff leaving from somewhere else. They end up again and again folding or even bought out by the same boring format radio they had left. Presumably, advertisers don't like them based on the stats etc.
People are right that this is an old problem by now. In 1990s-2000s that soulless commercialism of old media even contributed to popularity of the internet, when ironically that was the alternative place.
And now for quite some time we have people presenting avoiding challenging the user in slightest beneficial ways as some sort of moral argument. So to be clear, I also think this dynamic is bad.
I was pleasantly surprised driving through the boonies recently. Scanning through the channels I stumbled upon a station that I'd say was playing only 20-30% typical radio hits, with the rest filled with artists you may have heard of if you follow the scene but that never made as traditional radio stars along with a healthy set of underground/up-and-comers that you likely haven't heard of. It felt like how many describe the glory days of radio.
I also learned that that said station is owned by the same company as a station in my hometown, which is as bland, boring, and repetitive as radio gets. Still has me wondering what that market has that my local market doesn't. Perhaps the true death of radio is hinged on urbanization coupled with limited channel space? Maybe a channel like that can survive there because the small overall audience doesn't invite someone else trying to encroach on the available frequency? Whereas, as you noticed, where frequency space is at a premium someone else with formulaic programming in hand will soon come to buy out anyone who tries anything interesting.
Strangest is that the DJ will often talk about lesser-known songs/artists and will play a few second snippet of the music, but then go right back to the regular rotation. If the audience is already thought to be interested in the story/snippet about a song, you'd think they'd want to hear the whole thing, but apparently not.