Los Angeles alternative-radio institution KROQ has another tangible sign that its recovery is taking hold: the Klein/Ally Show, hosted by Kevin Klein and Ally Johnson, reached No. 1 in September morning-drive ratings across three major adult demographics.
The result matters beyond a single good month. The pair had spent much of 2024 and the first half of 2025 near the bottom half of the Los Angeles morning-radio field among adults 25-54, generally landing between 10th and 18th. Their September performance put them at the top in the 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54 groups, before a tightly fought October returned the program to No. 2 among 25-54 listeners.
For a station whose identity has always been intertwined with listener loyalty, music discovery and distinctive personalities, the comeback is less a clean reset than a hard-won reconstruction. KROQ has restored familiar talent, reworked its sound and given its current morning team time to establish its own voice. Klein and Johnson’s rise suggests that strategy is beginning to connect.
The ratings snapshot: what the numbers say
In September, Klein and Johnson posted a 10.8 share among adults 18-34, a 9.9 share among adults 18-49 and a 9.4 share among adults 25-54 during morning drive. A share is the percentage of measured radio listening credited to a station or program within a defined audience during a given period. It is not simply a count of everyone in Los Angeles who listens; it measures a program’s portion of radio use among a particular demographic.
Those demographic groups are crucial to the business of radio. Adults 25-54 are commonly treated as a core advertising audience, while 18-34 and 18-49 measurements indicate how well a show is reaching younger adults as well as the broader adult market. The Klein/Ally Show led all three in September. In the 25-54 group, it has been No. 1 for six of the first 10 months of the year.
October illustrates why radio success is usually better understood as a trend than a coronation. The show slipped to second place among adults 25-54, with KYSR’s The Woody Show back at No. 1. Still, the two shows are now competing closely after what had been a much larger gap in KYSR’s favor.
The broader KROQ picture also improved sharply. The station registered a 6.7 share among Los Angeles adults 25-54 in September, its best result in that measure since summer 2004. In October, KROQ took the No. 1 position in the market among that audience, ahead of KBIG, known as My FM.
A difficult inheritance in morning radio
Klein and Johnson did not begin with the luxury of being judged in isolation. They inherited a morning slot with an unusually imposing legacy. Kevin & Bean had been a Los Angeles fixture for 30 years, and Gene “Bean” Baxter’s departure at the end of 2019 closed a major chapter. Kevin Ryder continued alongside Allie Mac Kay and Jensen Karp, but all three were dismissed in April 2020.
Related coverage includes KROQ’s Klein/Ally Show Reaches No. 1 as L.A. Radio Rebound Grows.
Klein had previously worked mornings with Ted Stryker before the current pairing with Johnson. Taking over after Ryder’s exit meant navigating anger from listeners already upset by programming changes. The timing compounded the difficulty: the transition arrived at the beginning of the COVID era, when established voices and routines carried particular emotional weight for audiences.
The station itself was also struggling. A shift in KROQ’s music mix under prior leadership had helped create a sense among former listeners that the outlet had lost its bearings. In that climate, the morning show was carrying a difficult assignment: establish a new relationship with an audience that was still grieving, and in some cases actively resisting, the changes around it.
Klein has described the insecurity of those years plainly, including meetings where the team felt it might be auditioning possible replacements. The important part of the present turnaround is therefore not merely a chart position. It is that the program survived long enough to become recognizably itself.
Patience became the programming decision
Kevin Weatherly returned as KROQ’s program director in June 2022 and adjusted the station’s musical direction. Just as consequentially, he chose to give Klein and Johnson room to develop instead of treating every ratings cycle as a referendum on their future.
That distinction is practical, not just philosophical. A personality-driven show needs listeners to understand its rhythms, jokes and emotional stakes over time. Constantly reshaping it in reaction to a short-term ratings movement can make a broadcast cautious, inconsistent or generic. Weatherly’s approach was to let the hosts pursue the show they believed fit Los Angeles, even before the data rewarded it.
Johnson has framed that support as creative breathing room. Rather than obsessing over ratings reports, the hosts could make the show more personal and more specific. The eventual ratings jump does not prove that every decision was automatically right, but it does support the value of sustained creative confidence when a station is trying to rebuild an audience relationship.
Vulnerability and absurd local campaigns
The Klein/Ally format has worked through a deliberately broad definition of what a morning show can discuss. Johnson shared her fertility treatment journey publicly, including IVF injections shown through the program’s YouTube presence. She also discussed a miscarriage, prompting listeners who had experienced similar losses to reach out.
That kind of openness is not a marketing trick that can be reduced to a ratings formula. It is a choice to make difficult life events part of a public conversation, with the vulnerability and potential connection that entails. In this case, Johnson has said it would feel strange to omit major events from a show where the hosts regularly process their lives on air.
The personal material exists alongside the very silly kind of local provocation that morning radio has always been equipped to amplify. When a national burger ranking favored Habit over In-N-Out, the show responded by placing a billboard near the rival billboard. The message backed In-N-Out and jokingly signed off from “LA’s 14th most popular radio show.”
Other attention-getting bits were rooted in Los Angeles oddities rather than abstract viral stunts. After Klein’s wife’s Range Rover was stolen, the hosts enlisted listeners in the search and the vehicle was found. When Mel’s Diner removed a signed Sean “Diddy” Combs photograph from its walls, the hosts campaigned for their own publicity photo to take its place.
Individually, these are not earth-shaking events—and the show has not presented them as such. Their value is that they make the station visible in the city’s everyday cultural conversation. Former listeners encountering one of those stories online may be reminded that KROQ is still active, local and capable of surprising them.
More ways to encounter a radio show
The program has also made itself easier to sample outside the conventional morning commute. Last summer, Klein/Ally added an extra hour, continuing until 11 a.m. when many morning shows end at 10. KROQ also began airing rebroadcasts at 10 p.m., reaching people who may not be in a car—or even awake—during the original slot.
Daily YouTube livestreams add another layer. This is not radio abandoning radio; it is a recognition that listeners can encounter a host relationship through live video, social clips and catch-up viewing as well as a terrestrial broadcast. The fertility-treatment videos are one example of material that could not have been conveyed in exactly the same way through audio alone.
For commuters, that widening ecosystem lands at a moment when dashboards are becoming a larger software battleground. Google’s conversational AI is also moving into in-car interfaces, as covered in this look at Gemini’s Apple CarPlay arrival. KROQ’s approach is a different use of the same attention space: rather than relying solely on one live broadcast window, it is giving people multiple points of entry into an ongoing daily show.
The distinction matters. A radio rating still measures radio listening, but discovery can begin elsewhere. Someone may see a livestream segment, remember a host from a local story, and then tune in during a drive. The available evidence does not isolate how much each platform contributed to the ratings lift, but the strategy clearly expands the show’s reach and opportunities for familiarity.
The station’s larger homecoming
KROQ’s recovery has not rested entirely on Klein and Johnson. In April 2025, Ryder returned to the station in afternoon drive, a move that signaled a renewed embrace of familiar KROQ voices. He finished No. 2 in afternoons in September. Doug “Sluggo” Roberts also returned for middays.
Those returns can function as reassurance for lapsed listeners: the station recognizes the bond it once had with its audience and is prepared to earn it again. Once those listeners return, they may encounter a morning team that is not trying to impersonate an earlier era, but has had the time to become a durable part of the station’s present.
There is a useful caution embedded in Klein’s own reaction to the No. 1 result. Ratings move, competitors respond and a strong month can become a weaker month quickly. The show’s October drop to second among adults 25-54 underscores that point. For listeners, however, the daily test is simpler: whether the hosts make them laugh, offer connection and feel worth returning to.
Almost Acoustic Christmas arrives during the upswing
The improved morning numbers arrive as KROQ prepares the 35th edition of Almost Acoustic Christmas on Dec. 12. The lineup, revealed first on Klein/Ally, includes Foo Fighters, Weezer, Sublime, Interpol, Joyce Manor, Julia Wolf, Almost Monday and The Linda Lindas.
The event is a significant cultural marker for a station built around alternative music, and its timing strengthens the sense of a broader KROQ revival. Stronger station-wide ratings, an increasingly competitive morning program, returning on-air personalities and a large concert lineup are all moving in the same direction.
Whether the September victory proves durable will depend on the months that follow, not on one headline. But Klein and Johnson have already crossed the more meaningful threshold: they are no longer merely the difficult replacement story. They are central to KROQ’s new case for relevance in Los Angeles.
