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, and KUSC acquired the broadcast rights to the
Philadelphia Orchestra and
Texaco Metropolitan Opera. KUSC simulcast KFAC's format switch, including KFAC general manager Jim de Castro ceremoniously "
passing a baton" to KUSC general manager Wallace Smith, and a farewell message from outgoing morning host Rich Capparela, whom KUSC rehired. KUSC also obtained rights to the KFAC call sign, which was placed on the former
KSCA, KUSC's repeater in
Santa Barbara. due to its playing of excerpts instead of entire selections and playing of non-classical music. In one case, afternoon announcer Tom Crann—who arrived at KUSC from
Buffalo, New York—resigned after less than a year because of what he called "nasty, thoughtless personal attacks" relating to the more casual format. KUSC moved its main transmitter in 1993 from Lookout Mountain to Mount Harvard near
Mount Wilson. The move increased the signal strength and quality after a period of time in which a new station in
Tijuana,
XHTIM-FM, broadcast on the same frequency and caused interference. In 1990, KUSC assumed production of
Marketplace, a daily business news program that had previously been produced by
KLON in
Long Beach. KUSC had previously been involved since the program's debut on January 2, 1989, but the university and underwriter
General Electric saved the show when it appeared it might not be able to continue. Under USC production,
Marketplace expanded distribution to more than 250 public radio stations and won a
Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award. Though Smith defended KUSC's broader format as avoiding becoming "a cultural backwater appealing to a declining audience" and appealing to a more diverse market, in September 1996 the station announced it would return to a more traditional format amid a $500,000 financial deficit—attributed in part by USC's decision to charge KUSC rent—and continued dissatisfaction by loyal listeners. An internal audit found that the station had lost a third of its subscribers over three years and was not attracting new listeners with the broader format. The news was followed by the resignations of Smith and his wife, morning drive host Bonnie Grice. After their departures, KUSC relaunched with the new classical-focused format, from which the station deviated only to air
Marketplace and
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Its finances improved, and thousands of new members made pledges.
The Pennell/Barnes era In September 1997, Brenda Pennell (Barnes) of
WGUC in Cincinnati was named as the new general manager of KUSC. Unlike Smith, her title did not include USC's non-classical music operations. Over the next several years, the two remaining talk programs on the weeknight schedule were dropped.
The NewsHour was discontinued in March 1998, and in 2000 USC sold
Marketplace to
Minnesota Public Radio, the new operator of
KPCC, and dropped the program from its own lineup. In 1999, KUSC and
Colorado Public Radio partnered to form the
Classical Public Radio Network (CPRN), a national 24-hour classical music service. Programming from KUSC and Colorado Public Radio's
KVOD was featured on the service, which NPR distributed to public radio stations. CPRN was unwound in July 2008, a move that removed a restriction on KUSC's programming. Because KUSC programming was being distributed nationally, on-air references to Los Angeles were deliberately minimized. The move coincided with the end of classical programming on what had been
KMZT, and both events propelled KUSC's weekly listenership above KPCC and KCRW. KUSC moved its studios to the Manulife Building at Fifth and Figueroa streets in downtown Los Angeles in 2001. In 2010, it moved its broadcast studio to the
USC Tower.
Classical California USC expanded its involvement in classical music radio in 2011 by buying the format and call sign of
KDFC, a commercial classical music station in
San Francisco.
KDFC programming moved to noncommercial signals in San Francisco and
Angwin. Barnes departed in 2018 to run Seattle's
KING-FM and was replaced as president of USC Radio by Judy McAlpine, a former American Public Media and CBC Radio executive. In 2022, USC introduced the common brand
Classical California for KDFC and KUSC. By that time, the stations shared night and overnight programming and simulcast from noon to 3 p.m. daily, but they continued separate programming at other times. The new brand came alongside increased streaming and event programming. In February 2025, USC announced that it would integrate the stations into one program service with programming originating from the Los Angeles and San Francisco studios, in order to reduce duplicated efforts. On-air lineups were combined in October 2025, and the integration was completed in February 2026. ==Programming==