In Russia, FM stations are as bad as TV. Mostly "Russian chanson" music — songs about jail life and "thieves romanticism", lowest grade pop music and propaganda news. Is there decent stations in US?
But it would be super cool if such receivers had frequency range larger than for broadcast stations and streamed raw i/q samples.
For road trips, we always just play mp3's off of our phone. (The car doesn't have aux in, so we actually use a FM transmitter dongle for the phone.)
The stations in the US seem to have a _lot_ of advertisements, and as others have noted, are mostly owned by clear channel and play the same ten songs over and over. (Stations generally have a genre of music they play, so they'll repeat the same ten songs of that genre.)
But I agree that software defined radio would be an interesting function to have on a phone.
on the west coast there are tons of hispanic stations, the occasional bollywood station, classical, talk (both liberal and conservative), public radio, country, christian
I had a 1-hr each way car commute for about 6 months, and gave up on FM really quickly. Too much repetition, even on the Bollywood channel. I got Sirius XM, and loved it, except for the (somewhat) shady billing practices.
But it would be super cool if such receivers had frequency range larger than for broadcast stations and streamed raw i/q samples.