Who Are They Fooling?

Apparently I have missed something when it comes to listening to radio stations. I can stop listening to a station for several months and come back to it and they will still be playing the exact same songs that they were when I stopped listening to it. Why is this? What have I missed. Could it possibly be true that this is what the average American likes? To hear the same songs over and over again for nearly forever? Perhaps this might be acceptable if the number of titles that were being played was more than about 20. As it is now it seems that I hear most songs about once every two hours. Lets put this into perspective. If a person were to listen to a single radio station every day while they are at work, they would on average hear a popular song once every two hours (or perhaps more often depending on how popular it really was) That is four times a day, twenty times a week, eighty times a month. It seems that songs these days have a long shelf life, so it may be on the air for perhaps two years. That is 1,920 times that a radio station would play a song over two years. To put that into perspective, if that song were three minutes long, it would take four days, day and night, of listening to that song to equal that number. Don't people get tired of this? Certainly there is no lack of talent out there. Even with the record companies narrowing their search to groups that are good looking, there is still no lack of talent. Why not release more songs?

It has been my strategy to alternate between different radio stations. One week it is classical, the next, jazz, then perhaps rap for a few days, back to rock... Perhaps the CD with its eternal shelf life hasn't benefited radio in the U.S.? At least with vynal records they would wear out eventually and the radio station woud have to buy a new record. I cannot remember back that far clearly but I would think that it probably caused their play lists to roll a little more often than these days.

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