Note to self: Bring MP3 player to work

Because I'm really beginng to get annoyed by the radio.
For the last month and a half, we have been listening to the radio in the lab to have some background music to keep things from getting too dull. For reasons that were never explained to me, the station we picked was Sonic. They play lots of "modern rock" (read: overproduced "megahit" tripe you can hear on any "rock" show). One thing that slowly became apparent to me, though, is that they play the same handful of songs over and over and over. After hearing the latest single from The Offspring 3 times in one hour my brain began to liquify. Thier playlist rotation consists of probably 10 songs, interspersed with an few different songs from the same artists. That station is so incredibly repetitive that it really reaches the limits of my patience.

Today, we picked a new station since we all got sick of listening to the same few songs over and over and over. So we picked Bounce, or whatever it's called. And guess what?
SAME PROBLEM, DIFFERENT SONGS. Instead of listening to the same latest rock tunes a million times a day, we now hear the same pop/hip hop songs a million times a day. I began keeping a mental tally: In the last 6 hours, I've heard the same Miley Cyrus song 4 times, some retarded R&B song called "Busted Baby" 5 times, and a handful of other songs, the names of which I dont remember (I dont even like this kind of music so what do I care about the song names?) , 3 times. That's a playrate of almost once an hour for the more common songs.

This makes me wonder if the stations are being paid by the artists/recording companies to play these songs so often. "We'll give you $20,000 but you have to play Miley Cyrus at least once every 20 minutes!" I have enough music on my computer that if I were to listen to it on random, I would hear the same song maybe once every FEW DAYS. Am I supposed to believe that a professioal radio music station has a more limited selection of music than I do? Maybe I could understand it if one station were like this, but so far we're two for two. I wouldnt be surprised if we tried a new station and were faced with the same bullshit repetitiveness.

Maybe I should switch the station to CBC Radio 1. Yeah, the music on it might suck but at least there are interesting and informative shows, as well as the news, that they play. The station doesn't suffer the same repetitiveness that the others do; but I doubt that changing the station to CBC would be one that would go over well with my lab mates. After all, they were the ones that picked out the stations that play constant tripe to begin with. Is it too much to ask for a station that caters to those of us whose attention spans last longer than a few minutes?

There goes that damn Busted Baby song again...