This is a part of this discussion that gets overlooked. I often read comments from people complaining about format duplication in their city. "Do we need another country station?" No, one is enough. But competition means you have two. If there was only one company owning all the stations, there would be no need for format duplication, and you'd have more formats. Of course they would still rely on advertising for revenue, so the formats would still be pretty mainstream. But there definitely would be more format choices.
I completely agree with this, but I do think some competition is healthy. Let's take your example of the country station though. A small market has two country stations, one owned by a large national company, and the other locally owned. The locally owned station is bought by the national company. Since the national company owns the competition, the formerly locally owned station is flipped to classic country. Sure, you've given a choice to the older folks who don't like current country, but what if many of the former listeners do not appreciate that now the only country station in the market is 100% tracked from outside the market?
I do not buy the argument that nobody cares. The reason K-Love does so well is because they are taking every opportunity they can get to make sure they have full national coverage, and they are a known brand, but nobody in commercial radio has attempted this outside of Radio Disney, and I'd argue that failed not because of the model of radio, but because there's no money in targeting children. Instead, we get something like Minot's Hit Music Z94, but other than the imaging saying the above, there's no local content.
It's very true that the two stations I listen to most frequently from outside my market are mostly automated, but they have interesting playlists, not generic-sounding national playlists I can get on dozens of small-market stations owned by the same company. One is broad-based variety hits, the other very forward-thinking classic hits. Both surprise me at least once most of the time I listen. Another station has a much softer approach to Classic Hits than is standard, which I also appreciate. All three are locally owned. Contrast that to iHeart stations in similarly sized markets, all running the same very safe but very boring national list. If some of the big companies would follow the EMF model of two or three deep national stations in one market rather than pretending that all six or eight brands in a market are local while doing nothing but piping in national content, I think radio would be much better off.
