There were several reasons for the prevalence of orchestras on the radio.
The first was the record industry's desire to prevent radio from "burning out" record releases by playing them (analogy: the movie industry not wanting to release films to TV when that medium was new).
And there was the American Federation of Musicians and the bizarre Mr. Petrillo who required stations in markets as small as Chattanooga and Macon to have studio orchestras that had as much airtime as any recorded music played.
Over it all was the way recorded music evolved. Until the post-War era, recorded music was song based. Many orchestras and singers might do their versions of hit songs. This was a throwback to sheet music, where one bought the tune and played or interpreted it each in their own manner. Songs were hits, singers were not.
Some of the song-based system endured into the 50's with programs like Your Hit Parade with Snooky Lanson, Dorothy Collins and others singing the week's top songs. No, not the original versions by the original artists... a couple of singers doing their versions of the hit songs.
Stations that play current music do exactly that. They play the best new releases. But due to licensing issues, they generally try to be sure that each song is covered by their performance rights licenses and they don't have... and can't afford... to check rights and clearances for every self-produced song.
And listeners often want stations that only play familiar songs from an era that was musically pleasing to them. I remember a one-on-one interview about 25 years ago that I did for an oldies station in DC... a woman said "I like those songs because they remind me of the only time in my life I was really happy." That tidbit is a sample of the deep intelligence one can glean from real listeners. In this case, she did not want to hear new songs or different songs or deep cuts; she wanted to hear the music that defined her happiest years.
Again, many listeners... nearly all of them after they reach a transition point in life as they mature... cease to be actively looking for new music. They want to hear familiar songs, and they have a decade or two of "favorites" they want to hear. An occasional new song that "fits" is fine, but they have limited new music assimilation abilities and a low tolerance for unfamiliar tunes.
When I was programming an AOR station that did play currents... and which was hugely #1 in a market about the size of New York City... we tried a new music / new artist show on Sunday evening. Even with promotion and the largest cume in the Western Hemisphere, the show tanked the station not just in that hour but for the rest of the evening. We could fold in a new song or two by a well known artist in the playlist every week or two, but songs you'd never heard by artists you'd never heard of did not work even on a very, very dominant station. Yet we had put in a lot of effort to try to find good, compatible songs. It failed.
Most of your ideas are dated: to give one example, a new music sampler assumes anyone today wants physical product and has a device to play it. Folks looking for new songs and bands have a much broader choice of sources and don't give a rats posterior about a "sampler" of songs, most of which they will not like in today's fragmented world.
Getting back to KLOS, what we have today is a station that is long-famous for playing big familiar rock songs. It is not famous for playing new and unknown ones. The listener age appeal is well in the area where music discovery is not a positive or appealing quality. KLOS' issues are more in the area of cultural change in the market and musical taste changes among listeners.
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