K-LOVE kicks off its change to 95.3 FM

K-LOVE radio listeners were in for a surprise Friday morning as they tuned into the station's longtime Bay Area home of 97.7 FM and didn't find the expected mix of top contemporary Christian music songs.

Instead, they heard a short looped message:

“This is KJLV Los Altos with a special announcement for K-LOVE listeners,” the announcement said. “Positive encouraging K-LOVE in San Jose has moved to 95.3 FM and K-LOVE in San Francisco can be heard at 107.3. So now is the time to set a new preset to K-LOVE in the Bay Area — 95.3 San Jose, 107.3 San Francisco — your homes for positive, encouraging music 24 hours a day.”

Of course, those who have been following the K-LOVE story in the Bay Area have been expecting some type of change ever since the station's parent company, Educational Media Foundation, announced in March that it had bought the San Jose country station KRTY 95.3 FM.

Yet it was still unclear how the whole deal would shake out, given that the mighty K-LOVE — which is broadcast over more radio signals than any other Christian station in the country — was already well represented in the South Bay via 97.7 FM. Thus it seemed unlikely that EMF would want to transmit the same broadcast over two channels in the exact same area.

And indeed, that's not the plan.

Instead, as we also find out in that same looped message, EMF intends to broadcast K-LOVE's sister station, Air1, at 97.7 FM. Air1 is also a Christian music station— the second-largest in the country — but focuses more on worship music than its bigger sibling.

It's unclear when Air1 will take over the airwaves at 97.7 FM. The message simply says that it's “coming soon.”

This game of radio station musical chairs began when EMF paid a reported $3.138 million for KRTY's 95.3 FM signal, which had been broadcasting the likes of Garth Brooks, Miranda Lambert and Kenny Chesney for Bay Area listeners for some three decades before going off the air in June.

At the time of the sale, KRTY was the only local country music channel — although San Jose station KBAY-FM (94.5) since has stepped up to fill that void. KBAY had previously offered up a classic-hits format and played its final pop offering — appropriately enough, Britney Spears' “Baby One More Time” — before going country in April.

So now South Bay country fans can catch their Eric Church, Luke Combs, Walker Hayes and Carrie Underwood songs at 94.5 FM. And Christian music fans can tune into either 95.3 or 107.3 FM to hear Chris Tomlin, For King & Country, Lauren Daigle and others. And — “coming soon” — they can get their daily dose of worship music via Air1 at 97.7 FM.