1) New York City's #1 rated station is a "soft" format (WLTW/106.7 FM), so maybe there is hope for "soft" or "neutral" formats. Although, people in my age group (I am 20) are probably listening to one of the top 40/pop/hip hop stations in NYC.
If you are twenty and not from New York, you may not know that until three or four years ago NYC had a Smooth Jazz station, that sounded great and was on one of the best FM signals from the Empire State Building.
From industry scuttlebutt, the problem was that the format "didn't bill well." In a market where FMs bill in several tens of millions of dollars, somewhere I heard, this smooth jazz station billed only $3-million in its last year. And it also stole listeners from two other urban stations in its cluster. It switched to Alternative didn't do all that well, was sold and now does all-news.
As a one-time jazz DJ, who also worked at major beautiful music stations and watched what happened, the audience for both genre's aged past the attractive demos for major advertisers. And in markets like New York, where ad sales are driven by ratings and demos, there are other formats that naturally do better at attracting the right numbers. Smooth jazz is one of those formats that would probably have a NYC station if there were another ten commercial frequencies available, but with the current clusters, and most stations being owned by radio's biggest players, it's not going to get another shot on main FM channels, although it currently is available on HD.
The NY area does have a top classic jazz station in WBGO (where I started in radio, before it was jazz) but it is non-commercial and listener supported, and despite a full market signal, has an audience more like the size of a suburban FM. I don't know the numbers, but reliable sources have told me that there is very little interest in jazz for people under the age of 50. Jazz was always a niche format, but it did have its followers for a number of decades, but then music, and even the instruments used, switched over to rock in a big way, and now popular taste is moving in other directions.
Jazz is good stuff, its good to know there are some young folks who are into it. Let's hope you can convert more of your peers, but it will probably be easier for you to do that online, than on major market radio, even if you have a better way to present the format.