Depends on what you call research. I just attended a music radio seminar where song research was discussed in detail. Everybody researches songs. I went to one session where Spotify talked about how they research a song. On that same panel was the PD of a station in Denver. Record labels also research their own songs.
You bring up the hardest subject for music research which is evaluating a song before it is released and pushed for listening, whether on radio or streaming sources.
I've conducted a number of tests to determine at what point a song is "researchable". At the first listen, a song does not qualify, as the listener hears the overall sound but has not identified with it to establish a bond. When radio was the only new music source, it took multiple impressions over at least a period of several days to convert a song from "sounds nice" to a heart-felt emotion ranging from "it sucks" to "I love it".
Today, a person might initially like a song heard online, and then play it over several times and find it is a favorite to come back and hear many times, over and over. This could happen in an hour or a day, so the timetable is very changed and the speed of impact can be instantaneous.
Getting back to the topic of this thread: The thing regulators and legislators don't understand is that music is a business. 70 years ago radio had a lot of power. Today, the music is where the power is.
No, the power is still in the medium. But the medium is the Internet and not radio waves any longer.
Regulators don't see how much things have changed since the 50s. The fact that broadcast radio is still constrained by these obsolete laws while other music platforms can exist without any regulation seems completely crazy to me.
The "laws" that most constrain radio are the laws of physics. You can't delay radio waves until the listener is ready. And you can't make a broadcast station different for each listener, one by one. Radio is one-to-many and restricted most by that inflexibility that prevents tailoring.
And the number of available voices is restricted both by the width of the broadcast band portions of the radio spectrum and the ability of each market or city to support both listener financed stations and paid advertising radio media.
Yes, there are some content regulations such as profanity and obscenity prohibitions, but that has always been deemed necessary for any medium that can not be otherwise restricted so that those-too-young can't be exposed. On the other hand, there is a question of whether the unrestricted audio and video sources are any "safer" for children.
In any case, I do not think that the regulation of radio is the main issue that over the air (OTA) radio faces: it is the fact that when individuals find they can have individual playlists and individual entertainment choices, they do not frequent curated sources anywhere nearly as often.
