KROQ Reclaims LA Morning Drive as Klein/Ally Rises From 14th to No. 1

By Tom Whitfield

KROQ posted a 6.7 share in September among Los Angeles adults 25-54 — its best number in that demographic in 22 years — and in October the station rose to No. 1 in the market, ahead of Hot AC rival KBIG "My FM."

The driver is the "Klein/Ally Show." In September's morning drive, hosts Kevin Klein and Ally Johnson finished No. 1 in every major demo: 18-34 with a 10.8 share, 18-49 with a 9.9 share and 25-54 with a 9.4. The show has topped the 25-54 demo in six of ten months this year. In October it slipped to No. 2 in 25-54, losing the slot back to "The Woody Show" on rival KYSR ("Alt 98.7") — though that show's once-hefty advantage has evaporated, a slide the source partly attributes to its decision to drop longtime players, including Renae Ravey, which upset some listeners.

What changed?

As recently as eighteen months ago, "Klein/Ally" was slogging. Throughout 2024 and the first half of 2025 it hovered between 10th and 18th place among adults 25-54, mirroring the station's collapse after what the source calls "terribly misguided decisions" at the start of the pandemic in 2020: a changed music mix and the firing of morning host Kevin Ryder.

Klein, first with Ted Stryker and then with Johnson, inherited mornings after Ryder's April 2020 dismissal — alongside co-hosts Allie Mac Kay and Jensen Karp — and absorbed years of fan anger. The timing was brutal. Kevin Ryder's own predecessor show, "Kevin & Bean," had run 30 years, earned two broadcasting halls of fame, and ended only when Gene "Bean" Baxter left at the end of 2019. Listeners in lockdown wanted familiar voices.

"We were put in a bad spot, and we had to really fight to do the type of show we wanted," Klein says. "There were a lot of meetings we had where we were literally interviewing our replacements. It sounded like they were going to add another person to our show, but we could tell what was happening: they were ready to punt. We really did fear that any day our job was going to be stripped from us."

Who gets the credit?

Longtime program director Kevin Weatherly returned in June 2022, adjusted the sound, and — crucially — declined to panic about the ratings. "If you've got a really funny show, you ignore the ratings until the ratings prove it right," he says. "We believed in the show and knew that it would find its audience if we were patient — and that's what happened."

Klein recalls Weatherly's pitch directly: "Do the show that you guys want to do and I think it'll work. But if it doesn't, at least you did the show you wanted to do and you'll know you went out doing what you thought was right for LA."

The show went deeply personal. Johnson reported on her attempts to get pregnant, injecting her IVF treatments live on air — footage shared on the show's YouTube page. "I'm sorry you had to see my ass," she says. "But we have gotten pretty transparent about our lives, and when big things come up, it feels weird not to talk about them." When she opened up about a miscarriage, listeners who had gone through similar struggles wrote in.

There were stunts too. After USA Today named Habit's burger the nation's best, the show bought a billboard next to Habit's reading "No. 1 is overrated. In-N-Out's always better, signed, LA's 14th most popular radio show." "Some of these things were stupid at the time and are still stupid now," Klein says. "But these were little things that ended up getting out to people." Listeners helped track down Klein's wife's stolen Range Rover; the hosts lobbied Mel's Diner to replace Sean "Diddy" Combs' disgraced signed photo with their own publicity shot.

What does this change for KROQ?

Distribution widened. The show added an extra hour last summer, broadcasting until 11 a.m. against the standard 10 a.m. cutoff; rebroadcasts air at 10 p.m.; daily livestreams run on YouTube. Ryder returned to afternoons in April 2025 — No. 2 in the daypart this September — and Doug "Sluggo" Roberts came back to middays.

"Over the last couple of years, we definitely have seen listeners coming back to KROQ," Weatherly says. "And I think as people have come back and discovered 'Klein/Ally,' they're like, 'This is a really great morning show... They're real. They're authentic, vulnerable on the air. They're funny.' I think that Nielsen has finally caught up to it."

Klein keeps the caveat close: "As soon as we were told we were No. 1, we immediately were told by Weatherly that this could be a fluke. So right now we're in fluke phase, and we'll see how long that goes."

The station's 35th "Almost Acoustic Christmas," announced on "Klein/Ally" and set for Dec. 12, features Foo Fighters, Weezer, Sublime, Interpol, Joyce Manor, Julia Wolf, Almost Monday and The Linda Lindas. "It just feels good to have everything kind of clicking at the same time," Weatherly says. Whether the October dip to No. 2 in 25-54 proves a fluke or a trend is the question the next Nielsen book will answer.