AM Radio Stations in the Los Angeles Area

Photo courtesy of Kaboompics.com.

Also see:
-- FM Radio Stations in the Los Angeles Area
-- Most Popular Radio Stations in the Los Angeles Area

By Call Letters (Directory by Dial Location Follows)

See stations by dial location in table below.

Directory (in order by Dial Location)

* Formerly broadcasting Vietnamese programming, the station went silent on May 6, 2020

AM News radio station KNX is one of the oldest stations in the nation. Under the call letters KGC, it received its first formal broadcasting license on December 8, 1921. The station can even trace its origin to an earlier amateur station, 6ADZ, started by Fred Christian on September 10, 1920.

First licensed on March 10, 1922, as KJS, the 1330 kHz frequency (AM) is also one of the oldest radio stations in the nation. It is also the one of the oldest Spanish-language radio stations in the nation.

During the summer of 2021, radio station KRTH-FM (101.1) has held the leading position with the largest share of radio listeners in the Los Angeles area. Spanish language music station KLVE-FM (107.5) was the leading Spanish language station and KFI-AM (640) the leading news/talk station. Stations are measured in "cumulative audience," or total number of unique listeners who tune in for at least five minutes per week. This number can approach nearly 4 million listeners.

KAVL AM (AM 610) has broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers games continuously since 1958.

The John and Ken Show on KFI AM 640 is the most listened-to local radio talk show in the nation. In the peak hour of their daily broadcasts, they draw an audience of about one million listeners. John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou began broadcasting in Los Angeles in 1992, coming to Los Angeles from New Jersey and New York.

From 2003 through 2017, 1110 AM served as KDIS AM, the Walt Disney Company's flagship radio station in its Radio Disney network. The network featured popular music oriented to teens, pre-teens and children. In 2017, KDIS AM was Disney's last station broadcasting Radio Disney. It then decided to rename and re-format the station for country music. That effort didn't deliver for Disney, so the company decided to phase-out from mass radio broadcasting altogether. In 2023, Disney sold 1110 AM and its broadcast equipment to Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa.

In 1971, then Los Angeles International Airport manager Clifton Moore came up with an idea for a radio station that would broadcast airport traffic information for visitors to LAX. He thought it would help relieve growing airport traffic congestion. Radio engineers William S. Halstead and Richard W. Burden were brought in to put the project together. By 1972, the new station began broadcasting in the immediate LAX area on AM frequency 840. It quickly became apparent that early 1970s drivers still had to find radio stations on a “slide dial" which distracted them from driving. Halstead and Burden found that car radios could actually tune into radio frequency 530 at the very “bottom of the dial.” Such a station frequency could easily be located on the radio dial without actually having to look at the dial. The new station switched to AM 530 and came to be known as LAX Air Radio 530. The station, which eventually could be heard as far away as 30 miles from the airport, broadcast continuously until 2011. By then, the contract with the vendor that managed the station expired and the airport decided not to fund the station further.