and they tell you they can't play it because it's not in their current playlist.

This may be just a misunderstanding about what the "playlist" is.

Depending on the format of the station (i.e., Country, Soft Rock, etc.) the radio station will only have a small selection of music physically on hand (small compared to the literally mega-hours of music that exists in the world -- or in Paul Grzelak's empeg, for that matter.) When they said it wasn't on their playlist, they may well have meant that they literally did not have that song in their posession to play it.

In any case, the decision would have been made by the local program director, not by some evil corporate director in his penthouse suite in Austin, Texas, madly laughing Whuuaaaa haaaa haaa because he has made certain that nobody listening to any of his thousands of stations is going to hear anything good.

tanstaafl.