STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
So, A, I don't know what you listen to on the radio when you're not listening to NPR. But in my family, in my car, the kids demand...
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
(Laughter).
INSKEEP: ...The hit music radio. And during drive time - you know, the rush hours - they play, like, four songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A BAR SONG (TIPSY)")
SHABOOZEY: (Singing) Someone pour me up a double shot of whiskey.
INSKEEP: It's time to hear "A Bar Song." Then it's time to hear "A Bar Song" and then "Espresso" and then back to "Bar Song" or whatever the latest is. That's all they do.
MARTÍNEZ: It's on a loop all the time, it seems like.
INSKEEP: OK, so the question is, why do pop stations play the same songs over and over again? NPR's Lilly Quiroz investigates.
LILLY QUIROZ, BYLINE: Over the summer, I was home in Dallas listening to the hit music station 106.1 KISS-FM. Now, I expected to hear the latest hits, but I wasn't just hearing the same new songs. I was hearing the same old songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIVE ME EVERYTHING")
NE-YO: (Singing) Grab somebody sexy. Tell them, hey. Give me everything tonight.
QUIROZ: Pitbull's "Give Me Everything" took me back to 2011. And then I was jolted even further into the timeline with Baby Bash's 2003 song, "Suga Suga."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUGA SUGA")
BABY BASH: (Singing) Suga, suga, how you get so fly? Suga, suga, how you get so fly?
QUIROZ: I kept hearing that one, too. They just kept going back to the same songs, old and new. So why don't DJs play a wider variety of music?
JONAS ADAMS, BYLINE: They're not in control of the music at all.
QUIROZ: Jonas Adams is a producer here at NPR, and he also used to be a radio DJ. He says a lot of commercial stations are owned by corporations like iHeartRadio or Cumulus Media, and they make their programming decisions.
ADAMS: Music radio is not formatted with variety in mind. The pretty much only goal of music programming is to get as many people as possible to listen as long as possible, so they can sell some ads (laughter) and make some money.
QUIROZ: But repetition is a top listener complaint.
MIKE HENRY: Listener habits have shown that they'll keep tuning in to hear their favorite songs.
QUIROZ: Mike Henry is the founder and CEO of Paragon, a media consulting and research firm focused on radio.
HENRY: By playing the fewest amount of songs that test the best and repeating those as much as they can, people will tune back in. It's very common for the most popular songs to be played 18 times a day.
QUIROZ: And once a hit song tests well, it tends to stick around on the playlist. If one station has success with that model, Mike Henry says we get a feedback loop.
HENRY: Stations have a way of looking at what other stations are playing. And then everyone is basically following each other down the same road.
QUIROZ: And that's why pop stations often sound exactly the same from city to city. I'm not going to lie. I enjoyed listening to these throwbacks. But if you don't like listening to the same music over and over, Henry has a tip for you.
HENRY: There are a lot of noncommercial public radio music stations around the country that do the exact opposite, that play a lot of new music, a lot of unfamiliar music.
QUIROZ: So turn the radio dial to the left, and you might discover your favorite new song.
Lilly Quiroz, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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