pointless rambling ahead.
radio stations really don’t seem to understand the concept of diminishing marginal utility. I can only hear a song N times over the course of any given period before I get entirely sick of the song (I suspect most people are like this).
background: my commute time has been dramatically increased with my recent career change (old commute ~2 miles. new commute ~15 miles). I have resorted to the radio for “entertainment.” I do a little NPR, but mostly list to crappy Pop/top 40 stations.
Lil Wayne’s Lollipop song is a typical example of why radio is making me mad. A friend linked me to the video on youtube awhile back. A few days later i heard the song on the radio and liked it (in the “oh, thats catchy and i wont flip the station” kinda way). Then, within 2 weeks I had probably heard the song >40 times. Now I flip the channel immediately when it comes on.
Playing the song frequently at first is beneficial because it gains familiarity and i got to like it, but with the extremely high frequency, i only took a couple weeks before i totally hated the song. These stations hammer us with a song and then it falls off the map a month later. It’s a brutal cycle for us radio listeners. Very tempted to get the iPod integration asap…