There’s a new radio station in town that bills itself as “commercial-free and member-supported.” It appeared suddenly on a channel that used to be a college station. There are no live DJs, all the self-ads are generic corpo-sounding crap, and they play the same top 40s as every other generic corpo station in town.
Now, they’ve started a membership drive in the fake hopes of appearing like a grassroots station. The infuriating part is that we have a legitimate indie station (partially publicly funded) that they’re trying to steal money/contributions from.
It’s obviously a corporate ploy to destroy the current commercial-free station while replacing it with a fake one that will just turn into another soulless corporate station.
I think it’s the same practice as why sitcoms always used to revert to the status quo of the previous episode as if nothing had happened. Most humans are truly creatures of habit and find comfort in habit and so giving them something habitual is giving them what they want.
In other words a lot of people find comfort in the same song same time every day thing. It’s stupid, but stupid sells.