KZLA-FM is dumping its country music format

The Southland on Thursday lost its only country radio station, long-running KZLA-FM (93.9), which introduced a new pop format known as Movin 93.9, where veteran radio personality Rick Dees is poised to return to the local airwaves as the station’s morning host.

A date has not been set for Dees’ debut at the new station, which will replace the twangy hits of Toby Keith, Shania Twain and Tim McGraw with dance-ready music of Beyonce, Gwen Stefani, Gnarls Barkley and other R&B-minded; performers. Dees left his longtime stint as morning-drive host on KIIS-FM (102.7) in 2004 and was replaced by Ryan Seacrest, who continues in that post.

Movin 93.9 is owned by Indiana-based Emmis Communications, whose holdings also include KPWR-FM (105.9), a.k.a. Power 106.

“I think the sky is the limit,” said Jimmy Steal, Emmis’ vice president of programming, in an interview Thursday. “I think this station has the ability to be a market leader.”

Steal said he expects that Movin 93.9 will draw a “significantly different ... more mature” audience than the one that tunes into KIIS-FM (102.7), the area’s most popular English-language music station, according to the most recent Arbitron ratings.

KZLA had long been one of the nation’s top country stations, and billed itself as “America’s most listened-to country station.” But its ratings had steadily slipped in recent years, dipping from a 2.9% audience share five years ago, which placed it at No. 11 in the L.A.-Orange County ratings, to a 1.7% share in the most recent survey, tying it with KLSX-FM (97.1) at No. 20.

“It’s definitely going to leave a big hole in the national country music radio landscape,” said Wade Jessen, director of Nashville-based charts for Billboard magazine and country editor for Radio & Records, which Billboard recently acquired. “L.A. is such an important market. The business leaders here in Nashville are not going to see that as any sort of good news, and for good reason.”

L.A. joins New York without a country radio station, although Emmis is continuing the KZLA country format and streaming it at www.kzla.com and on Movin 93.9’s HD Radio side channel.

“It seems like in the biggest markets with high ethnic diversity that country radio has been challenged for quite a while,” Emmis’ Steal said. “We just saw an opportunity that was a business decision to go after a group of folks who were underserved and disenfranchised with the radio choices available. Our research definitely pointed out a target audience that has the potential for a much bigger payoff than we could target with KZLA.”

KZLA’s fortunes had not paralleled those of country music record sales, which had been on a modest upswing compared with an overall slump affecting most other genres. San Bernardino-based KFRG-FM (95.1) still has a country format, but its signal does not reach all of the L.A-Orange County area.

“It’s like in some other major metropolitan areas where country radio is a tough format,” Billboard’s Jessen said. “L.A. being the size of market it is, it’s tough. In today’s radio business, those stations have to be profitable in a short amount of time.

“The upside,” Jessen said, “is that we would certainly expect somebody in a radio market like L.A. to give country an opportunity.”