I live in a small college town in rural ohio. I listen to our local golden oldies radio station in my car because the songs are great, the ads are mostly local businesses, and i get local news from it. Although we also get a lot of Medishare scams, snake oil from supplement companies. But the ads are much better than the radio back when I lived in Houston 10 years ago. Even the Cleveland stations are pretty light on ads these days.

My main gripe with my local station is that the small conglomerate they are in all play Christmas songs at the same time in the winter. I understand the incentive behind synching up ads across your controlled stations, but why do they all insist on playing Christmas carols at the quarter hour across all channels? I fucking hate Christmas carols.

Yes!

FM radio has to compete with (free) Spotify nowadays given that 4g coverage is pretty ubiquitous, at least where I live. This means they can't stuff too many ads in there.