That's pretty much of an assumption since there are relatively few cases of a prime signal station in a market with a home team carrying an out of market team's play-by-play. Of course, there is a reason which immediately comes to mind: there is little passion for the "away" team.
That's not all that common unless there is a sales-driven reason for being part of a concert. Not a good example (although giving away tickets for artists you don't play is a common thing when a station realizes its listeners also may like seeing an out of format artist).
Nope. Stories get "ratings" (there is no story by story rating, by the way) based on relevance. Right now, the biggest story across the USA is about a plane that came down in Southeast Asia.
Actually, the only criteria for a music test for a gold based station is prior success of a song and a general "belonging" to the era and style of a station. Programmers generally test a lot more songs than needed just to fill the anticipated library size... often dynamically adjusting the library size in accordance with the results.
The only preconception is whether a song at least vaguely fits the station and is familiar enough to be a broad, mass appeal favorite.
Stations have been doing music testing for about four decades, and in larger markets all your competitors do it too. So everyone is thinking of how they can get competitively advantageous data from a test... and thus one-up the competitors. You kinda' think radio professionals are morons. They aren't and they try lots of things looking to win, and not all work.
First, stations that play "gold" don't play more recent songs for two reasons.
First, for the most part, those songs will be less broadly known, thus scoring lower. This has been learned over decades in all the different gold-based formats.
Second, a gold based station owns a position in its market based on specializing in an era and style. Playing more current songs "fuzzies up" that image and is detrimental. In a crowded competitive environment, messing with a station's positioning and image is very, very dangerous. The road is littered with dead stations that failed to observe the precepts of brand differentiation.
That's not acceptable music testing practice. The only way to determine the answer to the question "how much do you want to hear a song on the radio today" is by playing a snippet of the song and getting a vote on a scale that covers "never" to "a lot".
A gold based station will not play currents. Those that have tried, and I include myself in the list of experimenters or fools, have been rewarded with ugly results. Those of us who kept our jobs responded by not playing out-of-era music.
Deep cuts are unfamiliar cuts. Unless they were, in the time they were popular or in a few cases, later (as in being in a hit movie) widely exposed, unfamiliarity means low, low test scores. If you don't know it, you can't love it. Deep cuts are the mail-order brides of music programming.
And with good reason. We don't play currents in gold formats, and if we test secondary cuts and deep cuts and find they bomb every time, song after song, we stop spending money to on testing that sort of material as it is 100% non-productive.
We always test songs that "might" fit and might score well enough to play, even if we are not playing them now. These include crossovers, songs that did not chart high but may have good scores anyway, etc., etc. And with each test, we run through a new list of "what if" songs just in case. There are no preconceptions... just the guidance of experience.
Then they were fortunate to have been at tests for stations that had experience, skill and knowledge of what they are doing.
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