Once you get beyond the cities, there is still plenty of open FM spectrum. Getting a frequency isn't the real hurdle. Human effort and licensing are the much gr

Once you get beyond the cities, there is still plenty of open FM spectrum. Getting a frequency isn't the real hurdle. Human effort and licensing are the much greater challenges. Especially licensing. Even on commercial radio you can regularly catch them playing "10 second" clips of different songs, to stay within fair use, that they wish to play but cannot legally do so. The college stations are more brazen about it and will flat out tell you that they can't play different jobs for legal reasons. Indeed, commercial radio does have to appeal to an audience, but that audience would unquestionably enjoy other music – at least within the same genre. But playing it for them opens up a huge legal minefield. It is a lot easier to pick a small catalog that you can properly audit and disallow anything beyond that.