If NYC is considered a melting pot city why can't more formats survive.
You only get mass appeal formats once the "melting" has resulted in commonality. You have a wide variety of ethnicities and nationalities merging in places like NYC and LA and even Miami, Houston, Las Vegas, San Francisco and others. But what you get initially is specialized ethnic formats, such as Russian in NYC and Farsi in LA. Gradually, the second and third generations adopt the musical tastes of peer groups in school and social groups, achieving a much more narrow range of mass appeal radio formats.
Even when you look at streaming and download activity, you see that each "taste group" has a relatively narrow group of huge hits. As is found on the Great Seal of the United states and on things like coins and the dollar bill, "E Pluribus Unum" means that "out of the many groups of immigrants, a single nation" is created. Back "then" there were Dutch, Prussians, Germans, Irish, English, Welsh, French, Spaniards, indigenous peoples and Africans of many tribal societies who all came together, without hyphens, to for the nation.
While this last paragraph refers to hundreds of years before radio was invented, radio is just a reflection of society as a whole. If the nation is absorbing and assimilating vast numbers of disparate groups and creating one multifaceted but still unified society, then you see why there are only transitions in radio formats and web streams, not innovations.
A good example, well discussed on this board, is the "over 55" variety format called the WOW Factor from John Sebastian. Initially, he blended in lots of disparate genres, from country to r&b along with "normal" old Top 40 songs. But the "variety" was too great and the format was gradually made to focus more and more on the lasting pop songs of the Boomers and the ratings have responded. So here we see that "consensus" trumps "variety", proving yet again that variety does not mean quantity but, instead, "all my favorite songs". And those songs are nearly always those that are shared taste favorites of large groups of people.
