Why does it take so long for a song to hit the radio?

As I watched and rewatched One Republic’s video for their BEYOND incredible song Marchin On, I thought to myself, why is it that this is not on the radio yet?

One republic’s album came out in November of 2009. Immediately I fell in love with three songs on the album 1) Secrets- the song which I believe is slowly making its way onto the radio 2) Good Life – which was poised to be their third single but was replaced by 3) Marchin On- this song was chosen to be played at the world cup and is actually probably my favorite song of theirs. I don’t know about you, but I really dislike their current radio-overplayed hit All The Right Moves. This was the first single off of the album and is still playing. But I’m not really sure why. With videos already released for Secrets and Marchin On why is there a need for All the Right Moves to still be on the radio at all? 

This phenomenon has been happening for as long as I can remember. When I was an intern at Warner Music Group I was able to listen to all the new albums the week they were released. One of my favorite albums that came out during my internship was Shinedown’s The Sound of Madness.  I had never heard Shinedown before and immediately loved their hard rock sound. The great thing about Shinedown was the fact that even though some of their songs were very hard; like their first single Devour (an anti-war/anti bush number), their lead singer (Brent Smith’s) voice is so beautiful that it is actually very easy to listen to the rest of the albums more soft rock songs. My favorite song of the album is and was Second Chance. I think I listened to that song maybe 400 times that summer while I commuted from NJ into the city. Yet this song, which became hugely successful on mainstream radio, was not popular for at least 6 months! In fact I had recommended Shinedown's album to almost everyone that I knew and continuously mentioned how appalled I was at the fact that Second Chance took so long to mainstream. Now I understand it may be a little bit harder for a hard rock band to become popular on today’s pop radio stations, but it was just a really really long time for something like that to have happened. 

I’m not really sure why this happens aside from the ridiculous tendency of the radio to play a song ad-nauseum because its on the billboard hot 100. If the radio played songs that were actually up –to-date with the album’s release, it would greatly enhance our listening pleasure.