National Public Radio.
Conversation
Arguments and complaints.
What Riker1384 said 
Plus whining
My car radio is broken (some expletive-deleted stole the antenna :mad:
and I’m too cheap to replace it), and the only passengers I transport are the kids.
Sometimes we’ll have a recorded-book going on the cassette player, which does help.
My radio is dangling by its cables 
but when I had radio, or when I ride with somebody else, the radio usually goes off instantly. I believe the unspoken assumption is that everything anybody likes will be universally hated by everybody else, regardless.
By myself I usually listen to NPR. With the kids it’s the oldies station because they like it and because the songs are generally clean. Although they are beginning to ask some tricky questions. (“What does he mean he found his thrill on Blueberry Hill?”)
If they are out with me on Saturdays, though, they have to endure Car Talk and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.
I typically put the local hard rock station on, volume up or down depending on their enjoyment of it or if we’re talking. If my husband wants, he can change it to whatever he likes, but typically we follow the “driver’s choice” rule between us two. If I’m driving late night (typically as designated driver) or on the way home from a weekend away, then it’s no excuses, no exceptions, hard rock as loud as it takes to keep me alert.
I have 4 of those 12-CD Changer cartridges with nothing but Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Hank Mobley, Thelonioius Monk, Bud Powell, and the like.
Needless to say, when I have passengers, it’s conversation time… :eek:
I think it depends on the passenger…
For family: When I was a teenager, my siblings and I pretty much decided that the driver got to choose, although we would compromise if tastes were extremely diverse. Same with established boyfriends, then husband.
For friends: As someone else said, I have a collection of CDs in my car that I like, and I will let the passenger choose one of them. It’s a rather eclectic selection, so there is usually something tolerable to anyone I happen to be chauffering.
It also depends on the relationship and the kind of trip. If there isn’t much talking going on, music is better than silence. If it’s a situation that entails talking, the volume generally gets turned down so far that the radio/CD player may as well be off.
For my kids: My 14yo daughter rides in the front passenger seat (unless Mr. Kiminy is with us), and she can reach the radio buttons. We don’t particularly like her preferred music (mostly J-Rock, with lots of shouting in Japanese), so she listens to the radio station and changes the station everytime a commercial comes on. When the constant “jump-into-the-middle-of-a-song” gets to me, I start making her wait at least 15 minutes between changes. The radio also has “my buttons” and “her buttons”, so we each have three programmed stations.
For long trips, she brings her CD player so that I can listen to my own preferences using the car’s CD player and she can listen to her own stuff.
My 10yo son still sits in the back seat in a booster seat. He generally listens to whatever I’m listening to (currently Harry Potter 6 on CD) without complaint. For longer trips, he too had his own CD player.
The passengers.
My best friend listens to talk radio when she’s workin (limo driver). So that’s what she listens to when we’re in the car. Holy shit…I just can NOT relate. I mean, when you’re alone and following the conversation topics, that’s fine. But you can’t be in the car talking to someone OVER other people talking about stuff you really have to track with. It just doesn’t work!
What!? As long as they’re a captive audience, you should make 'em listen! Broaden their horizons. The whole “it sounds vaguely like country, it must suck” attitude really irritates me a lot (I LOVE old-school, good country like Emmy Lou Harris and Johnny Cash. A lot of the folk music I like sound pretty country-eque as well).
Anyway, in my car with my siblings, the driver and front passenger have about equal say. We listen mostly to two alternative stations. One is an independent station that tends to play stuff more on the acoustic/soft rock side of things, but that I like because it plays a fair amount of independent music, or music that doesn’t get much play on most commercial stations. The other is the harder side of alternative rock, which is fine with me the rest of the time. I can listen to lots of music, so it’s all good with me. Every now and then, my brother puts on the local mainstream rock station. The main virtue of this station is that it comes in from Boston all the way out to New York, which is pretty impressive. The whole equation changes if we’re going somewhere at night. Then we switch to the local NPR station for jazz or blues. Mmmm.
We also recently brought in a diverse collection of tapes that sit in a box between the front seats, so that’s a good alternative on long trips.
It’s pretty much the same deal with passengers - our car, our radio. We’ll usually turn it down, though, since we’re usually talking anyway.
My passengers are usually kids.
So my radio is normally set to NPR.
That way they can ask questions like, " How far are we from Afghanistan?"
“About a two day plane ride. Why?”
" I would send over my Pikachu to help our guys beat the bad guys."
You don’t get that kind of convo with Disney.
Our house rules for the car audio are that the shotgun person (“Navigator” or “Alligator” depending on how silly we’re feeling) is in charge of the accessories. That includes making cell phone calls on behalf of the driver, altering the heating/cooling settings, defrosting windows, or anything else that would require the driver to look away from the road. That includes the tunes.
The navigator is responsible for finding a consensus among the passengers, but the driver gets a veto.
Once we have kids, Morning Edition and All Things Considered will be interspersed with “Bananaphone” and “Manah Manah”.
Cool. I go through musical phases but currently, I have a bunch of Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, Ramsey Lewis and Coleman Hawkins CDs in my car. Maybe we should car-pool.
I guess I should say that I listen to whatever I damn-well want in the car but I do make exceptions for my brother. He’s hearing-impaired and mostly unable to distinguish the complex harmonies and rhythms of jazz. The genre is all a formless mush to him so I’ll usually let him pick the station with one exception: No Sports Radio! I’m a luke-warm sports fan, myself, but I can’t abide the “morons yelling half-baked opinions at each other about other morons” shows which seem to exemplify the format.