scottybk, I wish you had any experience in radio or any experience managing a business where you have to meet payroll and get the bills paid, or any experience in sales. If you did, your post would have never been made and you'd have a general understanding about why your remarks are so incorrect.
Here's a bit of reality: Joe Car Dealer buys a $2,000 schedule. They want to do a spot where they 'shout' in their ad. You say this will not be allowed. Joe Car Dealer says "Screw you, I'll spend my ad dollars elsewhere. You're not going to tell me what I can or can't do with what I buy." An advertiser says they can reach X percent of the market for a certain cost per thousand and if you can't match that, they're never buying radio. You explain you only have 6 minutes an hour and have to charge that higher price just to pay the bills. The client looks at you and says that's your problem and if I'm not affordable, don't waste their time.
Do you know radio frequencies are auctioned off to the highest bidder by order from the FCC's boss, Congress. So, you pay a few million for a big city frequency for the right to do all that engineering work and build your facility to FCC requirements, maintain it and pay an annual spectrum use fee, adhere to the ample FCC regulations and pay all the usual business costs and payroll. Just imagine you can put up a good $4 million just to sign on a radio station with zero income. Sound like the business for you? How about an easier way: pay about $6 million for a station that is already billing some good money but don't expect any profit from it for quite a few years unless you can do better than the last pro who ran it.
If you were making that sort of investment would you follow the research on building your station audience or do radio the way you think it should be? For me, I'd do what the best research tells me. If that says to play 300 songs over and over, I would. After all, radio is a business. You understand the big publicly traded radio corporations do what they do because research says to do that. They have to face their investors on results. Yep, the 'boring' playlist you mention. Nobody listens you say. That's a lie because independent research says 90% of Americans listen to radio weekly. In fact they listen somewhere around a dozen or so hours a week. Don't go stupid on me like a friend who tried to make me believe radio listening numbers are fictional and that that research company makes money with bogus information. I looked him in the eye and said "Do you actually believe what you just said, that a company has a business plan of selling bogus information as fact? I'm not that dumb."
You complain about commercials. Here's some reality: if the boring playlists and millions of commercials and traffic and weather everybody gets on their phones was true you couldn't complain about the commercials because nobody would be listening and those advertisers would not get the results they paid for. Then there would be NO commercial radio at all because very, very few are willing to pay a monthly fee to listen to their favorite radio station..
