I seldom listen to broadcast radio if I'm not in a car. If it's a road trip, my wife and I will usually put on NPR for the news, and almost always end up turning down the volume and discussing articles they broadcast. That's an old family tradition of mine I intend on keeping up when my kids are old enough to discuss the news.
I usually listen for music when I'm by myself in a car running errands. I can't stand commercials, so I end up station surfing with the 'seek' button whenever commercial breaks come on. If I run through the whole dial and hear nothing but talking (or shitty music), I turn the radio off.
Most talk radio is junk, in my experience. NPR's Fresh Air is about the only talk show I really enjoy.
If I lived in Britain or Japan, where most of the broadcast radio is commercial free, government funded, and pretty good, I'd listen to a lot more of it.
In the US, whatever happened to the "variety radio" revolution of the 2000s? I thought the public had once and for all vetoed short playlists and long commercial breaks. Why am I still hearing this? I remember when I used to look forward to driving to NYC, because WKTU used to play a nice variety of classic dance tunes from the past 3-4 decades. Now it's just another pop station, with the same 10 songs, many of which aren't really even dance tunes.
Network TV has stepped up its game in response to competition from the internet, finding whole new sources of entertainment (cooking, parking, romantic affair investigation, and haggling as spectator sports -- 20 years ago, whoda thunk?!) It seems like broadcast radio, instead, has regressed. And it really can't afford to, when there's an internet out there full of free stations playing only the music I want to hear, with no repeats and no commercials.
My next car is having a jack for an MP3 player, for sure.