I think that this thread is like the recent one on internet shopping, where a few people project their "norms" onto the rest of the UK population - e.g. the people who do the vast majority of their shopping online don't realise that most people don't operate like that - similarly the music aficionados wanting to avoid hearing the same tune twice in any calendar month forget that for most people the radio is a background noise providing a mildly distracting blend of familiar tunes, traffic updates, some news, some gossip.
It's not cutting edge, they play the same songs a lot of the time, but that's often fine, especially in a shared situation (an office/ shop/ family house). If I were living on my own then I'd maybe want more specialist stuff, I'd want b-sides from a generation ago, I'd want unsigned bands that nobody else had heard of, but a lot of people listen to the radio as a comfortable noise (rather than to discover a dozen new bands every hour).
It's hard to see a market for a lot of the stations that were around ten/twenty years ago, given the competition from elsewhere and the costs - whilst the Global changes are regrettably, it's the way things are going, unfortunately. But I do get nostalgic for a time when each town had their own independent radio station; just like you had different coloured buses when in an unfamiliar city, you had a different "sound", you had local heroes who were relative un-knowns outside the immediate area (just like you had proper regional television, not just a half hourly news bulletin).
Having seen the Global news, it made me google the radio station that I grew up with, the one where you felt like you had a relatively intimate relationship with some of the DJs, you listened to the evening show to hear fellow teenagers giving "shout outs" whilst you were struggling with homework. Spotify will never replicate that feeling of one person talking directly to you.
In hindsight, maybe that radio station was only kept alive because of the two rival double glazing companies that seemed to be hell-bent on buying up as many of the advert slots as possible to try to give them larger market share, I don't think any of the DJs went on to many bigger and better things (although a lot of DJs and light entertainment types did start out in local radio, an avenue that won't be open to future "stars"), but it was ours, it was real, it wasn't just an algorithm selecting songs, it wasn't the same national adverts, it mattered.
