KUSC (91.5 FM) is a non-commercial radio station in Los Angeles, California, United States, broadcasting a classical music format. It is owned by the University of Southern California (USC) and is part of its Classical California network. In Los Angeles, Classical California maintains studios in the USC Tower downtown and broadcasts from a transmitter on Mount Harvard, near Mount Wilson.
KUSC began broadcasting on October 24, 1946, and was the first radio station in the U.S. owned by a privately endowed university. It continued as a primarily student-run and educationally oriented station until April 1973, when it converted to a full-time classical music format. Under general manager Wallace Smith, who ran KUSC from 1973 to 1987 and 1988 to 1996, KUSC became one of the preeminent and most-listened-to public radio stations in the United States. It was one of the founding members of American Public Radio, one of the first major-market public radio stations to disaffiliate from NPR, and in the 1990s it was the producer of the business news program Marketplace. It bought or built stations serving Thousand Oaks, Santa Barbara, and Palm Springs, repeating KUSC programs. In later years, particularly after the demise of classical music competitor KFAC in 1989, Smith's attempts to make KUSC's classical format less traditional and more accessible to younger and diverse audiences bred discontent from core listeners and ultimately created financial difficulties for the station.
After Smith's departure, KUSC reverted to a more traditional classical sound. From 1999 to 2008, its programming was distributed nationally as the Classical Public Radio Network, an arrangement that limited the amount of local content and references KUSC could include on the air. In 2009, USC bought a radio station serving San Luis Obispo.
USC expanded its classical music services to Northern California in 2011 by acquiring KDFC in San Francisco, which continued to operate separately. Both stations were branded as Classical California in 2022 but continued to maintain separate morning and afternoon programming. They were combined into a single program service in February 2026.
History
Early years
On March 18, 1944, the University of Southern California (USC) applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to build a new FM radio station in Los Angeles, to broadcast on 42.9 MHz. The commission approved the application on August 15 and modified it in July 1946 to specify 91.7 MHz instead. On October 24, 1946, KUSC began broadcasting regular programs from 6 to 9 p.m., six days a week. Its antenna was mounted on a tower on the Hancock Building on the campus. A formal dedication followed on December 5 of the first radio station owned and operated by a privately endowed university. At the start, KUSC was patronized by the George Allan Hancock Foundation and featured student-produced programming.
KUSC was moved to 91.5 MHz in 1947. The station was regularly operating for hours a day by May 1947 and 7 hours by 1951. The station's "top announcer" in its first year was Stan Chambers, a graduate student who left for a job with TV station KTLA; other notable USC alumni who worked at the station and went on to broadcasting careers included Bill Owen and George Grande.
In 1970, the station was transferred out of the Department of Telecommunications and into student operation, but its potential was limited by meager budgets compared to other college radio stations and other noncommercial stations in Los Angeles. Though USC had invested in stereo equipment to upgrade older equipment that was no longer of broadcast quality, by the early 1970s, the station was a mostly disorganized string of educational programming, either produced by volunteers or sent in by other agencies. For instance, programs on KUSC's schedule in 1971 ranged from the talk programs Psychology Now, Rapline and Trojan Sports Report to comedy and blocks of middle-of-the-road, classical, progressive, and jazz music. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was offering to connect KUSC for public radio service for free, but KUSC did not have a paid staff—which the corporation required for eligibility. A dispute over transmitter sites with KJLH in Compton led to that station's owner filing a petition to deny renewal of KUSC's broadcast license. It primarily broadcast rock music, which many other stations in the Los Angeles area supplied.
Classical: The Wallace Smith era
In 1972, Wallace Smith—a recent doctoral graduate of USC—became the station's first full-time general manager. Smith immediately set out to professionalize the station. With funding from the CPB, KUSC joined NPR, and the station was reorganized into USC's School of Performing Arts. On April 2, 1973, the station adopted a new format of classical music. Abram Chasins, the former musical director of New York's WQXR, joined as cultural development director. With the CPB's first ever grant to expand a radio service in a major market, in 1976, the station moved its transmitter to Lookout Mountain and its studio to newer, larger space on campus. With its new facilities, KUSC now had full-market coverage. To match, the paid staff was expanded from 5 employees to 25 and the music library doubled in size. James Brown of the Los Angeles Times noted that the station was mounting a serious challenge to another major fine arts station in Los Angeles, KFAC. Conversely, student involvement dropped off: by 1977, the only area where USC students were involved was graduate journalism students producing newscasts. Within three years of the grant, the station's weekly audience rose from 40,000 listeners to 224,000, a figure that made KUSC the most-listened-to public radio station in the nation. Within a decade, KUSC had, in the words of Mark Schwed of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, "[grown] ... from a rinky-dink college station to one that now produces programs that are heard throughout the country". One of those programs was a radio drama adaptation of Star Wars. Announced in 1979 as a co-production with the BBC, which pulled out of the project before its 1981 debut, the series was possible because George Lucas—an alumnus of USC—sold the station the rights for a dollar. In 1981, KUSC acquired KCPB, a public radio station in the Conejo Valley that had struggled financially since its 1979 startup, and began simulcasting its programming in that area.
In 1982, KUSC was one of five founding members of American Public Radio, initially intended as a distribution organization for fine arts programming, including KUSC presentations such as Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts. The early 1980s brought financial mismanagement and budget cuts for NPR. Smith, one of NPR's directors, opted to resign from the board, and in 1985, KUSC pulled out of NPR entirely and dropped the last NPR news program it carried, All Things Considered. By this time, KUSC had become one of the most successful radio stations in the city with 38 full-time employees and 25,000 subscribing members.
Smith departed KUSC in 1987 to become the manager of the WNYC stations in New York City. KUSC struggled to find a replacement for Smith, and he struggled with the workplace dynamic at WNYC. He returned a year later to a new title as president of USC Radio, overseeing KUSC and the university's entire radio apparatus. During this time, Smith expressed concern that the existing classical radio format needed to be broadened so as to attract younger listeners who were not as exposed to classical music. The format changes came in September 1989 and brought an afternoon entertainment magazine and lighter classical fare to the station's airwaves, and coincided with the demise of KFAC and KFAC-FM, which were both sold and switched formats. KFAC-FM's new owners, Evergreen Media, donated the station's music library to KUSC along with a $35,000 check,