I grew up on these stations, these voices. One of my earliest New York City memories is of being bundled with my brothers in the back of my father’s car, sometime in the late ’70s, barreling up the West Side Highway, watching the lights of the George Washington Bridge swoop through the sky as CBS FM counted down “The Top 100 Songs of All Time.” (“In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins always seemed to be No. 1.)

At 16, after failing my first road test, I was still in the back seat, but the car was my friend’s Cabriolet, and the radio was tuned to Z100 to catch George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” or “Nasty” by Janet Jackson. Then, as now, Top 40 songs were so ubiquitous that, when they ended, we simply spun the dial and found them again.

Like the songs we sweat to at the gym, the songs we want to hear in the car are not necessarily the ones we love at home. For me, home is Big Star, classic Stax, the Avett Brothers; the car is Beyoncé, Bad Company, Tommy James and the Shondells. Twenty years ago, two college friends of mine with intimidatingly hip taste in music used to drive around Portland, Me., waiting for the classic rock station to play Pearl Jam’s “Better Man”; they would never buy the album, but on the road they loved to sing the song. The car is a musical separate sphere, where some days Kansas’ dirgelike “Dust in the Wind” will be on three out of four stations, while on others I’ll be blessed with “Loves Me Like a Rock,” “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “Cruel to Be Kind,” all in a row.

It’s true that on stations with “classic” playlists like CBS and Q104, the songs have been selected through complex corporate algorithms to appeal to listeners just like me. But I’m glad my daughters are being exposed to music they would otherwise never hear. I know that commercial radio conforms to strict playlists, but when I’m driving, it still feels like the music of chance. I surrender control and let the music play. If every moment of my kids’ musical experience originated from iTunes, I would have missed many perfect moments — like 10-year-old Lucy’s horrified response to “Another Brick in the Wall” (“This school district sounds terrible”) or her older sister Maggie’s conviction that Frankie Valli is actually Elmo.

THERE are downsides to this lack of control, of course, like realizing that your fifth grader is singing “my angel is the centerfold” to herself while doing her homework. (Better than “Thrift Shop,” I guess.) But I think it’s worth the risk.