Just for your reference, focus groups are not done for music research. Your insistence in blaming focus groups for whatever you think is wrong with radio is absurd and incorrect.
For example, he might have created his own exclusive "hits" by having bands come into the studio -- through the huge glass entryway-- and perform live, then sweeten the best tracks, play them a lot and get the audience hooked on the exclusive content.
You would have to do battle with the entire music industry and much of artist management for this. Even when a station does it's own concert it can't as a ruie re-run the live broadcast or use the live version songs anywhere else. The record companies realize today that it would interfere with critical BDS and MediaBase detections, change listener buying patterns, etc.
I've personally dealt with the issue at a rock station were we did an acoustic set by a name group for 15 minutes, live, just before noon. three times a week. When we tried to feature some of the songs in the morning show, we got those calls that said, "we will send a C&D if you keep doing it". The labels were Sony, Universal and WEA... so even though this was a few years back, nothing will change.
That's already been answered: Sklar simply thinned the herd of possible already-hit songs by having a music meeting.
This has been done. I've done it. But the result is not exactly as you describe.
I had the first FM in a market of about a million people, and I purposely did not run commercials. I was only able to do that because my three AMs in the market produced sufficient profit so that I could indulge in a "hobby" with the FM. But as the station started to develop audience... measurable audience... my biggest local clients asked to advertise. To discourage them, I quadrupled the rate of the highest rated AM in the market. Amazingly, quite a few paid it so I limited the spot load to 6 20-second spots an hour at that enormous rate and gave line exclusivity. The station was very profitable that way until many other FMs came on the air with copycat formats and advertisers could, as Michael said, "buy around me".
That was a unique situation where there was great demand and only one product available.
My first station in that market went on the air as the first Top 40. We averaged the spot load of the then top stations, and did one-third of that per hour, and sold spots at more than the highest rate of the top station. We went for 6 months without billing even $50 a month. Nobody would pay more for a new format with no proven audience. Then the numbers appeared, and we sold out in 30 days, even in overnights... but it was because the ratings were so high that the spot rate was actually cheap. We then increased rates!
But the rates were paid because the cost per thousand was actually the best in the market. Any station, again as Michael says, that wants to double th rate and cut the spot load in half has to double the ratings to make it possible because advertisers buy based on a metric: the number of listeners every dollar spent obtains. If your cost per listener is too high, you get bought around.
Jobs's company essentially created two product categories, the portable MP3 player and the consumer smartphone. But both music players and telephones were already, just like radio, established product categories. So Jobs did not "think outside the box" in using new technology in miniaturization and such to create a better, smaller player or a mass market step up from the BlackBerry. He stayed in the category, though. He pushed the existing envelope. He did not invent a new category.
How many earth shattering radio ideas have come along? FM, in about 1938. Let's see, it took that one about 30 years to catch on. Top 40, which saved radio in the early 50's, took several years to gain momentum... with some big markets not having a Top 40 station until around '58, 6 years after its debut at KOWH.
Radio mirrors consumer taste. As a reflector, it can not really change tastes but it can join the groundswell of any trend. So innovation is going to be just like what jobs did with the over-one-hundred-year-old telephone: adaptation to the times with things that are perceived as big changes in the moment but which history will take little note of.
