Reviewed by Peter Berk, President and Chief Media Strategist, Berk Marketing · Last updated 8 September 2026
Los Angeles · Spanish Language Radio
Five stations in this market broadcast in Spanish to more listeners than any single English station reaches. Berk Marketing buys them for advertisers and represents no station here.
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Short answer. Spanish language radio is not a niche buy in Los Angeles. In Nielsen’s July 2026 book the five largest Spanish stations in the market hold a combined 13.0 share, and the highest rated English station in the same book holds 6.2. The formats are not interchangeable, so the station you pick matters more here than it does in most of the market. Your commercial can be written in English and produced in Spanish by the station itself, with your approval at both stages, and most advertisers should be buying this inventory on remnant, which is typically 40 to 60% off the published rate card.
The number most advertisers have wrong
Advertisers tend to treat Spanish language radio as something you add at the end if there is budget left. In this market that gets the arithmetic backwards.
The five largest Spanish stations in Los Angeles hold a combined 13.0 share. The single highest rated station in the market, an English language Hot AC signal, holds 6.2. Counting every Spanish station in the market the figure is 16.9. Those are audience shares from one Nielsen book, so they move a few tenths either way from month to month, but the gap does not close.
Because no single Spanish station tops the ranker. They sit from 3.6 downward, so an advertiser scanning a list from the top sees English stations and stops reading. The audience is real and it is large. It is simply spread across more signals, which means it has to be bought deliberately rather than found by accident.
Shares change with every monthly book. The full Los Angeles ranker is updated as each one is published.
The argument, made literally
He sold classical at KFAC, hip hop at Power 106, country at KZLA and talk at KABC and KMPC, all in Los Angeles, on air and in sales, before ever representing an advertiser. That range is the reason format sits at the center of every plan he builds rather than at the end of it.
It matters here because Spanish language radio in Los Angeles is not one format wearing one label. It is at least three, with different audiences, different listening occasions and different frequency requirements, and they get sold to advertisers as though they were one thing.
The full career, nine formats and a dozen stations, before ever representing an advertiser.
The distinction that decides the buy
Buying “Spanish radio” in Los Angeles is like buying “English radio.” It tells you the language and nothing about the listener. The three formats that carry the audience here are genuinely different products.
The largest and most culturally specific of the three, carried in this market by La Raza on 97.9 and La Nueva on 101.9. Strong daytime and drive listening, a heavily working audience, and the format where a direct offer with a clear phone number tends to do its best work.
Amor on 107.5 is the market leader in this format and the highest rated Spanish station in Los Angeles. Broader and more mainstream in tone, closer to how an English language AC station is used, and generally the safer first buy for a national brand entering the market.
Jose on 97.5 and 107.1, and Recuerdo on 103.9 and 98.3. Familiar music aimed at an older, longer tenured audience, many of them bilingual. Useful when the offer suits an established household rather than a younger buyer.
These are music formats, which means the listener is tuned in but not necessarily leaning in. That is not a criticism of the format, it is how music radio is used everywhere. It does mean a Spanish music schedule needs real frequency to penetrate, and a plan that spreads a small budget thinly across all five stations will be heard by nobody.
The stations
| Station | Dial | Brand | Format | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| KLVE-FM | 107.5 FM | Amor | Spanish Contemporary | TelevisaUnivision |
| KLAX-FM | 97.9 FM | La Raza | Regional Mexican | Spanish Broadcasting System |
| KLYY-FM | 97.5 and 107.1 FM | Jose | Spanish Adult Hits | Entravision |
| KSCA-FM | 101.9 FM | La Nueva 101.9 | Regional Mexican | TelevisaUnivision |
| KRCD-FM | 103.9 and 98.3 FM | Recuerdo | Spanish Adult Hits | TelevisaUnivision |
Three more Spanish signals sit below these five: Que Buena on 105.5 and 94.3, Mega on 96.3, and La Mera Mera on 980 AM. They are buyable and sometimes they are the right answer, particularly when a schedule on the larger five is priced out of reach.
The question every English speaking advertiser asks
This is the part that stops most advertisers, and the honest answer is that it is more straightforward than they expect. You are never asked to approve something you cannot read.
The script is built the way any Berk script is built, with the offer, the repetition and the phone number where they belong.
Before anything is translated you sign off on the script in your own language. Nothing moves until you have.
The station’s own production team handles it. They know the audience, the idiom and how the copy needs to sit on their air.
The Spanish version comes back for a second sign off before anything is produced. Then one of the station’s own voices records it, so the spot sounds like it belongs on that station rather than like an outsider reading at the market.
The reason this works is that the people who know the audience best are the ones who put the words into Spanish. A translation ordered from a studio with no relationship to the station or its listeners is where Spanish language radio creative usually goes wrong.
The rule that costs advertisers the most
If you contact one of these stations directly and a seller quotes you a rate, that quote follows you. Once a station has your name against a number, an agency coming in behind you has very little room to negotiate on your behalf, and in many cases we will not be able to represent you on that station at all.
There is nothing improper about it, it is simply how station credit and account assignment work. It is also completely avoidable, and it costs nothing to avoid. One call before you make any other call is the whole of it.
Berk Marketing represents advertisers. It owns no stations, sells no inventory and is paid by the advertiser, not by TelevisaUnivision, Entravision or Spanish Broadcasting System. The station list on any plan starts from who reaches your customer, not from who is paying us.
We will run a competitive monitoring report at no charge and with no obligation. It shows which stations your competitors are on, at what times of day, how many spots, and it includes the actual audio of their commercials.
In many cases nothing shows up at all, and that is worth knowing too. You have to start by knowing what others are doing.
Get the ReportThe way most advertisers should buy these stations
A commercial break with an unsold unit in it earns the station nothing. Stations would far rather sell that unit quietly and cheaply than let it run empty, and that unsold inventory is what remnant buying is. It is not a lesser class of airtime. It is the same stations and the same dayparts that full-rate advertisers buy, priced differently because you are flexible about exactly when your spot lands. In practice that is typically 40 to 60% off the published rate card.
The budget is placed before anything airs. That is what buys the access to the discounted inventory in the first place.
We aim at Monday to Friday, 6am to 7pm, which is the part of the day worth having on a music station. Weekends and evenings are available too. Then we track what actually clears.
The station reports back. If a spot was preempted, you do not pay for it. It is refunded or carried into the next flight, your choice.
That last point is the part advertisers usually miss. The exposure on remnant is uncertain, the money is not. You are never billed for a spot that did not run.
You cannot know your exact airtimes in advance. Remnant is placed on the fly, and if the station sells that unit at full rate at the last minute, yours is the one that moves. You get a post log afterwards showing exactly when everything aired, so nothing about it is hidden. What you are trading is certainty of placement, and in return you buy considerably more weight for the same money, which matters on a music format where weight is what makes it work.
You need fixed dates and times, your offer expires on a specific day, or you are tied to an event. Anything genuinely time-dependent should be bought at rate rather than on remnant, and we will tell you that rather than sell you a schedule that cannot deliver what you need.
Fit
Your product or service is bought by households across the whole of Southern California rather than one neighborhood. Legal, insurance, home services, healthcare, automotive, tax and immigration-adjacent services, financial services and direct response offers all tend to work here. It helps a great deal if someone on your end can take a call in Spanish, because the phone is where this format earns its keep.
Nobody in your business can handle a Spanish speaking caller or walk-in. That is the one genuine disqualifier, and it is worth being honest about it before you spend anything. A campaign that rings phones nobody can answer is money spent creating a bad first impression. Fix that first and the media will still be there.
Questions
Yes, if the campaign is meant to generate calls, and that is the honest answer even though it costs us buys. Radio in this format works by making the phone ring. If the caller reaches someone who cannot help them in Spanish, you have paid to create a bad experience and you will not see the response the schedule should have produced. If you are advertising something that drives traffic to a location instead, the same logic applies to whoever is behind the counter.
That is close to what happens, with one important difference. We write it in English and you approve it, then the station’s own production team puts it into Spanish rather than a studio with no connection to the audience, and you approve that version too before it is recorded. The read is then done by one of the station’s own voices. A literal word for word translation done in isolation is where this usually goes wrong, because idiom and rhythm do not survive the trip.
It depends on your offer, not on the ranker. Amor on 107.5 is the highest rated and the most mainstream in tone, which makes it the common first buy. But a direct response offer aimed at a working audience will often do better on a Regional Mexican signal like La Raza or La Nueva. The wrong approach is to buy a little of all five, which produces a schedule too thin to be heard on any of them.
There is no single answer and anyone who gives you one without asking questions is guessing. The rate depends on station, daypart, length, how many weeks you run and what inventory is unsold when you buy. The practical entry point for a Los Angeles schedule is around five thousand dollars a week. Below that the frequency is usually too thin to be heard, and that is more true on a music format than on a talk one.
No, and that assumption costs advertisers money. These are general market stations carrying general market products: cars, insurance, phones, legal services, home repair, groceries. The listener is buying the same things everyone else is buying. What changes is the language the message arrives in, not the category.
No. Berk Marketing represents advertisers only and holds no station or network representation anywhere. That is the reason a plan can recommend against Spanish radio when it does not suit you, and the reason it is worth calling before a station quotes you.
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