How KROQ Became World Famous Again: Two Kevins, a Return to Rock and a Lot of Patience for Its New Morning Show
Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla are among the producers who have spent years crafting a multi-part docuseries chronicling the history of influential Los Angeles alternative radio station KROQ — and five years ago, they seemed to have a proper (albeit, depressing) ending to the story. As reported at the time by Variety, the once-“world famous” KROQ had collapsed in both ratings and reputation as the station lost its two-time Hall of Fame morning show “Kevin & Bean,” while simultaneously blowing up its familiar playlist. “It’s the End of the World Famous KROQ As We Know It,” the Variety headline read.
And yet, five years later, there appears to be a bit of a recovery happening at the legendary radio outlet. In October, KROQ posted a 5.8 share in its key adults 25-54 demo — making it No. 2 in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest marrket. That’s quite a change from even just a year ago, when the station was still pulling a fairly tepid 2.6 share (No. 16 in the market).
KROQ is also experiencing a tremendous boost in the mornings, where the “Klein.Ally.Show” hit its best-ever numbers last month — after having struggled to gain traction during its first four years on air.
“We have a great frickin’ story here,” says KROQ senior VP of programming Kevin Weatherly. “It was dark times at this station. Many people thought would never come back. A lot of people thought KROQ was dead, and it was dead to a lot of our listeners. But now here we are, five years later. Not only have we come back from that, but we’re back bigger in terms of ratings success, than we’ve been in 15-plus years.”
Per KROQ’s monthly ratings trends, that rebirth really took off this past spring — and it’s probably not a coincidence that the listenership skyrocketed after the return of ex-morning host Kevin Ryder. With his former “Kevin & Bean” partner Gene “Bean” Baxter, Ryder spent 30 years at KROQ until March 2020 — when he and co-hosts Allie Mac Kay and Jensen Karp (Baxter had departed in November 2019) were fired over the phone during the pandemic.
Ryder returned to the KROQ in afternoon drive this past April 1, a little over five years after being axed — and soon after, another KROQ vet, Doug “Sluggo” Roberts, also returned to the station for regular shifts after a long absence. (During that time away, Ryder and Roberts hosted an afternoon show together on L.A. classic rock outlet KLOS.)
“I think Kevin Ryder coming back had the halo effect of really benefiting the radio station from a ratings standpoint,” Weatherly says. “Because it did give people permission that were pissed off, that didn’t want anything to do with KROQ, to go, ‘OK, if he’s coming back, it’s cool for us too.’”
After a lengthy, dominant streak in the demo (most recently hitting No. 1 in L.A. with a 4.8 share in March 2011), KROQ began to hit major turbulence in the mid-to-late 2010s. Not only was radio facing new competition from podcasts and other sources, but the alternative rock genre was on the skids — leading many legacy stations, including San Francisco sibling KITS-FM (“Live 105”), to get out of the format entirely. In 2017, KROQ parent CBS Radio was acquired by Entercom (now Audacy), causing more uncertainty and change. And at the same time, as KROQ’s music rotation began to sound stale, crosstown rival KYSR (“Alt 98.7”) was proving to be a formidable competitor — particularly after KROQ assistant program director Lisa Worden jumped to that station.
By 2020, Weatherly (above, with Coldplay’s Chris Martin) — who had programmed KROQ since 1992 — was also ready to leave. “Honestly, I was burned out,” he says. “I was programming three radio stations, and we had a new company.” As Entercom/Audacy started to tinker with KROQ, Weatherly was being recruited by Spotify — and he decided the time was ripe for a new challenge.
That was March 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. After he left, Weatherly’s replacement, Mike Kaplan (who had previously run Alt 98.7 — which started beating KROQ in the ratings), initiated a wholesale revamp at KROQ. Not only was Ryder tossed, but the station’s music mix was tweaked. Alternative pop (particularly songs hitting it big on TikTok) was given heavy rotation, while Kaplan pulled back on previous rock-intensive core artists.
KROQ listeners were angered by Ryder’s firing, and also didn’t embrace the station’s new sound. “I was on the sidelines at Spotify, watching the fucking thing burn,” Weatherly says.
Audacy Southern California regional president Jeff Federman now admits that in hindsight, KROQ made some major tactical errors in 2020. “During COVID, everybody wanted comfort food,” he says. “People were coming to us for something they knew, and they weren’t getting it. Not only were they not getting the music, but they also weren’t getting their morning show. So it was a double whammy. COVID was hard enough, but we made it harder on ourselves, certainly.”
Federman immediately set out to recruit Weatherly back to the station and perform some triage. “I’m glad I did Spotify. I learned a lot,” Weatherly says. “But there was that yearning to come back to what I’ve done my entire adult life, which is programming KROQ. KROQ means something to me. I care about its legacy.”
Weatherly returned in 2022 and immediately restored the station’s reliance on its mostly gold-based rotation — standards from the likes of Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers. That’s not necessarily an exciting or forward-thinking playlist, and even inside KROQ, music fans bristle at the station’s reliance on burnt-to-a-crisp songs that have been in constant rotation for decades. But management says research shows that those artists are what KROQ’s core 25-54 audience wants.
“Whether it’s your favorite restaurant, or tennis shoes or whatever, people have an expectation of a brand,” Weatherly says. “And the expectation of the KROQ brand is Foo Fighters, Chili Peppers, Linkin Park and Green Day. [Kaplan] kicked all those bands to the curb in favor of these new TikTok-flavor-of-the-moment bands. That’s not what people expect or want from KROQ. It’s just getting back to what people expect. Everyone goes, ‘the station used to play a lot more new music,’ or ‘the station used to be about discovery.’ All those things are still true. It’s just that, our audience is not 12 to 24. Our audience is 25 to 54. These are the people that grew up with KROQ. We’re not chasing something that we’re not going to probably get any longer. We’re going to satisfy the people that are still here.”
Still, Weatherly admits that it’s harder to program radio than it used to be. For one thing, corporate parent Audacy filed for bankruptcy last year and has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs — thinning his staff.
And in recent years there’s been fewer breakthroughs in rock music because of fragmentation. “It’s just harder and harder for songs to get consensus on newer music,” he says. “Which is why at festivals, there’s so much done around nostalgia. Younger people are discovering these older songs, and so I think we benefit from that.”
But this year, KROQ’s playlist has found some pockets of refreshening from a recent uptick in new and resurgent bands. Weatherly points to fresher artists like Bad Omens, Turnstile, Pierce the Veil and Wet Leg, as well as new hits from veterans like Deftones and Sublime. “I think that we’re benefiting from the fact that there’s a new crop of rock bands that people are passionate and care about,” Weatherly says.
KROQ isn’t the only station seeing an uptick from alt rock’s mini revival. Audacy relaunched Live 105 in San Francisco in 2023, around the same time that Cumulus Media brought back heritage Atlanta alt rocker WNNX (“99X”). In August, Windsor, Canada, station CIMX (“89X”), which was modern rock pioneer in the Detroit market, returned after a five year absence. Back in LA, in October’s Nielsen Audio persons 6+ ratings, Alt 98.7 posted a 3.6 share — its best since July 2010 — while KROQ was close behind with a 3.3.
“I’ve felt good about alternative product for six months now,” says radio research analyst and columnist Sean Ross. “The chart finally seems to be the mix of pop, guitar rock and ‘none of the above’ that we need. I also think it’s great to see heritage stations like Live 105, 99X Atlanta, and 89X Detroit being relaunched. That’s a vote of confidence for the format, too, particularly when there’s an instant response like there was for Live 105.
“That said, the chart is still very reliant on heritage artists… also, this is still a heavily library-based format. Most stations are at 1-2 currents an hour. It’s always a turning point in any format when programmers feel confident swapping a gold for a recent song. We need to get to the point where ‘Believe’ by the Bravery isn’t better than an exciting new song. But as stations grow, it will give them more ability to break new music.”
For now, Weatherly says KROQ’s mix is probably about 70% gold and 30% current music. And the station is probably even more gold-based now than it was when Weatherly was previously programming KROQ — but he argues that’s true of all radio formats.
“Forget alternative, but any contemporary station, whether it’s the hip hop station or the top 40 station, they’re all playing a lot more gold,” he says. “And if you go and look at DSPs (digital service providers, like Spotify or Apple Music), some of the most-consumed music on those platforms is gold-based.”
But it’s ultimately not just about the music, as the station’s personalities have also help revive KROQ’s profile. After Ryder was canned, afternoon hosts Kevin Klein and Ted Stryker were moved to mornings, where they faced a backlash over the sudden change. Stryker hopped to Alt 98.7 in 2021, and Klein was paired with Ally Johnson on the renamed “Klein.Ally.Show.” It was a long slog to recruit listeners from there.
“It was hard enough to launch a morning show 20 years ago, back when there were only radio stations that people were getting their music and their content from,” Federman says. “But now you have all these other platforms to compete against.” Adds Weatherly: “It took a long time for people to find it, because everything’s so fragmented.”
When Ryder returned to KROQ, his first stop was on the Klein/Ally show, and Federman credits the visit as a “stamp of approval that, ‘hey, all you other KROQ listeners that used to listen, you can come back.’” Now, “Klein.Ally.Show” has risen to a 7.0 share, No. 2 in the demo — a tremendous leap from No. 14 in March. Ryder’s approval helped, as did a massive awareness campaign for the morning show this summer, which included putting repeats into other dayparts, and briefly extending the show to 11 a.m.
“Even with the different changes that the company’s gone through, the one thing that’s been consistent since I’ve come back is their support of our belief that we’re on the right track (with ‘Klein.Ally.Show’),” Weatherly says. “In this day and age, that’s unheard of. To give a show four years to develop before you start to see the payoff, most people don’t have the patience anymore.”
(Not every recent experiment has worked: KROQ swiftly shelved an attempt to revive the station’s “Loveline” sex and relationships talk show. “I think we realized pretty quickly that it’s 2025, not 1995 and that people can get this stuff everywhere,” Weatherly says.)
Ryder did not leave KROQ quietly in 2020, cracking the mic one last time after being dismissed to share how he was “truly baffled by KROQ’s cold, heartless attitude toward the people who built this station.” But with Weatherly back and new management at Audacy, he was willing to give it another try.
Still, he admits he was a bit hesitant to return at first, given how much he had heard about the dark times at KROQ in the years after he left. “It was a strange thing to be doing,” he says of his return. “But now it does feel like I’m fully back, and I’m getting a ‘this is fun again’ vibe at KROQ — which is contrary to the way it has been. I talked to a lot of people who were there for the five years that I wasn’t, and they were like, ‘it’s been so difficult, the management didn’t know what they were doing,’ and everybody was upset. They didn’t treat people well. I think Kevin Weatherly coming back, and the changes at the top of Audacy, have changed the company dynamic. The people who used to run Audacy didn’t understand what KROQ is, and more importantly, they didn’t care to understand what KROQ is.”
For her part, new Audacy CEO Kelli Turner lauds KROQ for continuing to be one of the most recognized station brands in radio. “I wasn’t around for it, but I know when Kevin Weatherly left, when Kevin Ryder left, it definitely went through a bit of a low point. So it’s super exciting to see the energy and momentum behind it now… I think just letting them do what they do, and taking obstacles out of the way to let them do it well, is a big part of my role.”
Weatherly is cautious not to characterize this as an attempt to re-create KROQ circa 2005 — even if a lot of the music and the on-air talent is the same. “We want there to be a thread of continuity to the past, but we’re not living in the past, which is why we have a brand new morning show that we think is the present and the future,” he says. “We’re not a classic alternative station. We’re not just saying that we want to be a ’90s alt station. We still look forward but we’re not, and this one of the differences from what the station went through five years ago, trying to distance ourselves from anything that happened before.”
Up next for KROQ is its annual “Almost Acoustic Christmas” concert event on Dec. 13, and yes, it leans heavy on older acts like Evanescence, Social Distortion, Third Eye Blind, Rise Against, Papa Roach, Yellowcard and the All-American Rejects, but it does have a few newer faces: Wet Leg and the Paradox.
Weatherly admits that it’s a lot harder to book these one-off events these days. “The major labels, they’re not as invested in rock bands as they used to be,” he says. “They’re a little more interested in chasing whatever the current viral moment is. So a lot of the bands that we play are independents. There’s fewer A-level acts that you can book. And another thing that had made it harder is the proliferation of festivals and the amount of money that they pay these bands. We’re not competing with Coachella.”
But at the same time, he says it’s important to note that bands still “appreciate and understand what radio airplay means. There’s still something about hearing your song on the radio that every band wants to experience.”
And that’s especially true when a local radio legend like Ryder is the one introducing those songs. KROQ’s ratings surge after his return should prove that on-air talent still makes a difference.
“That makes me extremely happy, because, KROQ is and has been one of the top five most important radio stations in the world,” he says. “To see them screw it up as badly as they did, if I can help I get back some of the magic it used to have, I’m in. I spent my whole life on this radio station.” Maybe Kimmel and Carolla do have a new, more redemptive ending for their KROQ docuseries.
And yet, five years later, there appears to be a bit of a recovery happening at the legendary radio outlet. In October, KROQ posted a 5.8 share in its key adults 25-54 demo — making it No. 2 in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest marrket. That’s quite a change from even just a year ago, when the station was still pulling a fairly tepid 2.6 share (No. 16 in the market).
KROQ is also experiencing a tremendous boost in the mornings, where the “Klein.Ally.Show” hit its best-ever numbers last month — after having struggled to gain traction during its first four years on air.
“We have a great frickin’ story here,” says KROQ senior VP of programming Kevin Weatherly. “It was dark times at this station. Many people thought would never come back. A lot of people thought KROQ was dead, and it was dead to a lot of our listeners. But now here we are, five years later. Not only have we come back from that, but we’re back bigger in terms of ratings success, than we’ve been in 15-plus years.”
Per KROQ’s monthly ratings trends, that rebirth really took off this past spring — and it’s probably not a coincidence that the listenership skyrocketed after the return of ex-morning host Kevin Ryder. With his former “Kevin & Bean” partner Gene “Bean” Baxter, Ryder spent 30 years at KROQ until March 2020 — when he and co-hosts Allie Mac Kay and Jensen Karp (Baxter had departed in November 2019) were fired over the phone during the pandemic.
Ryder returned to the KROQ in afternoon drive this past April 1, a little over five years after being axed — and soon after, another KROQ vet, Doug “Sluggo” Roberts, also returned to the station for regular shifts after a long absence. (During that time away, Ryder and Roberts hosted an afternoon show together on L.A. classic rock outlet KLOS.)
“I think Kevin Ryder coming back had the halo effect of really benefiting the radio station from a ratings standpoint,” Weatherly says. “Because it did give people permission that were pissed off, that didn’t want anything to do with KROQ, to go, ‘OK, if he’s coming back, it’s cool for us too.’”
After a lengthy, dominant streak in the demo (most recently hitting No. 1 in L.A. with a 4.8 share in March 2011), KROQ began to hit major turbulence in the mid-to-late 2010s. Not only was radio facing new competition from podcasts and other sources, but the alternative rock genre was on the skids — leading many legacy stations, including San Francisco sibling KITS-FM (“Live 105”), to get out of the format entirely. In 2017, KROQ parent CBS Radio was acquired by Entercom (now Audacy), causing more uncertainty and change. And at the same time, as KROQ’s music rotation began to sound stale, crosstown rival KYSR (“Alt 98.7”) was proving to be a formidable competitor — particularly after KROQ assistant program director Lisa Worden jumped to that station.
By 2020, Weatherly (above, with Coldplay’s Chris Martin) — who had programmed KROQ since 1992 — was also ready to leave. “Honestly, I was burned out,” he says. “I was programming three radio stations, and we had a new company.” As Entercom/Audacy started to tinker with KROQ, Weatherly was being recruited by Spotify — and he decided the time was ripe for a new challenge.
That was March 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. After he left, Weatherly’s replacement, Mike Kaplan (who had previously run Alt 98.7 — which started beating KROQ in the ratings), initiated a wholesale revamp at KROQ. Not only was Ryder tossed, but the station’s music mix was tweaked. Alternative pop (particularly songs hitting it big on TikTok) was given heavy rotation, while Kaplan pulled back on previous rock-intensive core artists.
KROQ listeners were angered by Ryder’s firing, and also didn’t embrace the station’s new sound. “I was on the sidelines at Spotify, watching the fucking thing burn,” Weatherly says.
Audacy Southern California regional president Jeff Federman now admits that in hindsight, KROQ made some major tactical errors in 2020. “During COVID, everybody wanted comfort food,” he says. “People were coming to us for something they knew, and they weren’t getting it. Not only were they not getting the music, but they also weren’t getting their morning show. So it was a double whammy. COVID was hard enough, but we made it harder on ourselves, certainly.”
Federman immediately set out to recruit Weatherly back to the station and perform some triage. “I’m glad I did Spotify. I learned a lot,” Weatherly says. “But there was that yearning to come back to what I’ve done my entire adult life, which is programming KROQ. KROQ means something to me. I care about its legacy.”
Weatherly returned in 2022 and immediately restored the station’s reliance on its mostly gold-based rotation — standards from the likes of Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers. That’s not necessarily an exciting or forward-thinking playlist, and even inside KROQ, music fans bristle at the station’s reliance on burnt-to-a-crisp songs that have been in constant rotation for decades. But management says research shows that those artists are what KROQ’s core 25-54 audience wants.
“Whether it’s your favorite restaurant, or tennis shoes or whatever, people have an expectation of a brand,” Weatherly says. “And the expectation of the KROQ brand is Foo Fighters, Chili Peppers, Linkin Park and Green Day. [Kaplan] kicked all those bands to the curb in favor of these new TikTok-flavor-of-the-moment bands. That’s not what people expect or want from KROQ. It’s just getting back to what people expect. Everyone goes, ‘the station used to play a lot more new music,’ or ‘the station used to be about discovery.’ All those things are still true. It’s just that, our audience is not 12 to 24. Our audience is 25 to 54. These are the people that grew up with KROQ. We’re not chasing something that we’re not going to probably get any longer. We’re going to satisfy the people that are still here.”
Still, Weatherly admits that it’s harder to program radio than it used to be. For one thing, corporate parent Audacy filed for bankruptcy last year and has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs — thinning his staff.
And in recent years there’s been fewer breakthroughs in rock music because of fragmentation. “It’s just harder and harder for songs to get consensus on newer music,” he says. “Which is why at festivals, there’s so much done around nostalgia. Younger people are discovering these older songs, and so I think we benefit from that.”
But this year, KROQ’s playlist has found some pockets of refreshening from a recent uptick in new and resurgent bands. Weatherly points to fresher artists like Bad Omens, Turnstile, Pierce the Veil and Wet Leg, as well as new hits from veterans like Deftones and Sublime. “I think that we’re benefiting from the fact that there’s a new crop of rock bands that people are passionate and care about,” Weatherly says.
KROQ isn’t the only station seeing an uptick from alt rock’s mini revival. Audacy relaunched Live 105 in San Francisco in 2023, around the same time that Cumulus Media brought back heritage Atlanta alt rocker WNNX (“99X”). In August, Windsor, Canada, station CIMX (“89X”), which was modern rock pioneer in the Detroit market, returned after a five year absence. Back in LA, in October’s Nielsen Audio persons 6+ ratings, Alt 98.7 posted a 3.6 share — its best since July 2010 — while KROQ was close behind with a 3.3.
“I’ve felt good about alternative product for six months now,” says radio research analyst and columnist Sean Ross. “The chart finally seems to be the mix of pop, guitar rock and ‘none of the above’ that we need. I also think it’s great to see heritage stations like Live 105, 99X Atlanta, and 89X Detroit being relaunched. That’s a vote of confidence for the format, too, particularly when there’s an instant response like there was for Live 105.
“That said, the chart is still very reliant on heritage artists… also, this is still a heavily library-based format. Most stations are at 1-2 currents an hour. It’s always a turning point in any format when programmers feel confident swapping a gold for a recent song. We need to get to the point where ‘Believe’ by the Bravery isn’t better than an exciting new song. But as stations grow, it will give them more ability to break new music.”
For now, Weatherly says KROQ’s mix is probably about 70% gold and 30% current music. And the station is probably even more gold-based now than it was when Weatherly was previously programming KROQ — but he argues that’s true of all radio formats.
“Forget alternative, but any contemporary station, whether it’s the hip hop station or the top 40 station, they’re all playing a lot more gold,” he says. “And if you go and look at DSPs (digital service providers, like Spotify or Apple Music), some of the most-consumed music on those platforms is gold-based.”
But it’s ultimately not just about the music, as the station’s personalities have also help revive KROQ’s profile. After Ryder was canned, afternoon hosts Kevin Klein and Ted Stryker were moved to mornings, where they faced a backlash over the sudden change. Stryker hopped to Alt 98.7 in 2021, and Klein was paired with Ally Johnson on the renamed “Klein.Ally.Show.” It was a long slog to recruit listeners from there.
“It was hard enough to launch a morning show 20 years ago, back when there were only radio stations that people were getting their music and their content from,” Federman says. “But now you have all these other platforms to compete against.” Adds Weatherly: “It took a long time for people to find it, because everything’s so fragmented.”
When Ryder returned to KROQ, his first stop was on the Klein/Ally show, and Federman credits the visit as a “stamp of approval that, ‘hey, all you other KROQ listeners that used to listen, you can come back.’” Now, “Klein.Ally.Show” has risen to a 7.0 share, No. 2 in the demo — a tremendous leap from No. 14 in March. Ryder’s approval helped, as did a massive awareness campaign for the morning show this summer, which included putting repeats into other dayparts, and briefly extending the show to 11 a.m.
“Even with the different changes that the company’s gone through, the one thing that’s been consistent since I’ve come back is their support of our belief that we’re on the right track (with ‘Klein.Ally.Show’),” Weatherly says. “In this day and age, that’s unheard of. To give a show four years to develop before you start to see the payoff, most people don’t have the patience anymore.”
(Not every recent experiment has worked: KROQ swiftly shelved an attempt to revive the station’s “Loveline” sex and relationships talk show. “I think we realized pretty quickly that it’s 2025, not 1995 and that people can get this stuff everywhere,” Weatherly says.)
Ryder did not leave KROQ quietly in 2020, cracking the mic one last time after being dismissed to share how he was “truly baffled by KROQ’s cold, heartless attitude toward the people who built this station.” But with Weatherly back and new management at Audacy, he was willing to give it another try.
Still, he admits he was a bit hesitant to return at first, given how much he had heard about the dark times at KROQ in the years after he left. “It was a strange thing to be doing,” he says of his return. “But now it does feel like I’m fully back, and I’m getting a ‘this is fun again’ vibe at KROQ — which is contrary to the way it has been. I talked to a lot of people who were there for the five years that I wasn’t, and they were like, ‘it’s been so difficult, the management didn’t know what they were doing,’ and everybody was upset. They didn’t treat people well. I think Kevin Weatherly coming back, and the changes at the top of Audacy, have changed the company dynamic. The people who used to run Audacy didn’t understand what KROQ is, and more importantly, they didn’t care to understand what KROQ is.”
For her part, new Audacy CEO Kelli Turner lauds KROQ for continuing to be one of the most recognized station brands in radio. “I wasn’t around for it, but I know when Kevin Weatherly left, when Kevin Ryder left, it definitely went through a bit of a low point. So it’s super exciting to see the energy and momentum behind it now… I think just letting them do what they do, and taking obstacles out of the way to let them do it well, is a big part of my role.”
Weatherly is cautious not to characterize this as an attempt to re-create KROQ circa 2005 — even if a lot of the music and the on-air talent is the same. “We want there to be a thread of continuity to the past, but we’re not living in the past, which is why we have a brand new morning show that we think is the present and the future,” he says. “We’re not a classic alternative station. We’re not just saying that we want to be a ’90s alt station. We still look forward but we’re not, and this one of the differences from what the station went through five years ago, trying to distance ourselves from anything that happened before.”
Up next for KROQ is its annual “Almost Acoustic Christmas” concert event on Dec. 13, and yes, it leans heavy on older acts like Evanescence, Social Distortion, Third Eye Blind, Rise Against, Papa Roach, Yellowcard and the All-American Rejects, but it does have a few newer faces: Wet Leg and the Paradox.
Weatherly admits that it’s a lot harder to book these one-off events these days. “The major labels, they’re not as invested in rock bands as they used to be,” he says. “They’re a little more interested in chasing whatever the current viral moment is. So a lot of the bands that we play are independents. There’s fewer A-level acts that you can book. And another thing that had made it harder is the proliferation of festivals and the amount of money that they pay these bands. We’re not competing with Coachella.”
But at the same time, he says it’s important to note that bands still “appreciate and understand what radio airplay means. There’s still something about hearing your song on the radio that every band wants to experience.”
And that’s especially true when a local radio legend like Ryder is the one introducing those songs. KROQ’s ratings surge after his return should prove that on-air talent still makes a difference.
“That makes me extremely happy, because, KROQ is and has been one of the top five most important radio stations in the world,” he says. “To see them screw it up as badly as they did, if I can help I get back some of the magic it used to have, I’m in. I spent my whole life on this radio station.” Maybe Kimmel and Carolla do have a new, more redemptive ending for their KROQ docuseries.