Classical KUSC

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.