Radio and the record industry are at the most adversarial point they have been at in the last 80 years. Record companies want radio to pay them a performance royalty now, while in decades past they paid radio... in all manner of ways... to play songs.
Radio, today, gets very little money from record companies. When they do, it is generally and only because the record company has a 360 deal with the artist and they are promoting a concert, not record sales. It has gotten so that it is difficult to even get free CDs or downloads as on-air prizes and the record companies now often charge to use an artist's image in a station TV spot or van wrap.
Radio ownership, now as it was in the 50's when today's type of music radio was created, just want's to play music that will attract a sizable audience that they can offer to advertisers.
Millions and millions are spent on music research, even down to markets much smaller than Phoenix like Reno and Huntsville. The reason for testing music is to find what people want to hear on the radio.
Anyone who has done or caused to have done research... and anyone who chats with other programmers in other formats... knows the degree of satisfaction of listeners with the music on the radio.
In fact, even if listeners have alternatives such as streaming sources, they look for much the same music as local radio stations play and the reason why they subscribe to Spotify and such is to be able to select their own playlist rather than have some other person's curated playlist.
By talking with listeners, which is what most significant stations do in some form or another.
That is advice that generally results in failure as the vast majority does not want that. I can't tell you how many times I have been blessed with a competitor that had a much larger playlist and a much smaller audience. Even once, when I thought expanding the list was "the answer" I crashed the station miserably; fortunately I did not fire myself but simply tightened up the list and recovered.
Except for a few quirky small market owner operator stations and a bunch of LPFMs, nobody runs a station to play the music they like. Yes, we all have stories about how some place we worked was made miserable because the owner's wife would call and tell us to play her a song... but that was back when we worked in unrated markets or at low rated stations.
Listenership has declined because there are so many alternatives for entertainment. From MP3's to streaming, from online videos to video games, there is just more competition. Yet radio has held up amazingly well by "playing the hits".
Sure, you can have your opinion. But when you base it on wrong facts, such as the ideas about record company influence and management "forcing" of music, you are going to be corrected.
