Brainwashed by Radio

I've been listening to the radio lately, no stations in particular just flipping around. And I've noticed certain stations only air a limited playlist over hours of air time. Im talking about a variety of five unique songs over hours. To me this is very strange because there must be millions of songs available in the world, after taking into account the music that would appeal to a given region, or legal issues or any number of reasons there are still many songs to select from. Not to mention the playlist from last month, then the month before, and so on and so forth.

There must be a logical reason for why such a small selection of music is played, its not like people watch the same movie three times a week and I cant imagine a limited playlist would draw more listeners, it would probably turn listeners away because it's the same thing over and over.

So who would stand to gain the most from just a few songs flooding the airwaves?

Then I remembered the Mere-exposure effect, this is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often a person is seen by someone, the more pleasing and likeable that person appears to be.

Now what does this all mean to me? Select radio stations are being funded by; music labels, producers, companies, or whoever in order to coerce average people into liking certain songs/artists. That it comes down to is radio broadcasters being payed to play select music so the radio music is being used as one long commercial. Which creates money for whoever actually owns the royalties on the music, just because an artist is on the cover, they didn't need to write, record or do anything to create the media.