B-94 return?

An early B-94 (WBZZ) bumper sticker. (Click to enlarge photo.)

A few weeks ago Lance Venta of radioinsight.com posted a tease on his site asking “Is ‘B-94’ about to return from the grave in Pittsburgh yet again?” The story was posted behind a pay wall and it wasn’t until a friend who is a subscriber to Lance’s site told me what the gist of the article was about.

It seems that CBS radio has recently registered “B94radio.com” and “B94 Pittsburgh.com”. Further discovery on our part shows that they have recently and consistently renewed the station’s main website address “B94FM.com“.

You remember B-94 right? It was Pittsburgh’s primary contemporary hit radio station from the time it signed on in 1981 until Kiss FM showed up in the year 2000. It reimaged and rebranded a couple of years later and after that failed, it became a classic rock station and a very short stint as a “man talk” station before being rechristened B-94 in 2007. 2 1/2 years later it became KDKA-FM, with the all sports format that it has now.

Anyhow, Venta speculates that, because of the new domain registrations, there could be another return of the heritage station. He doesn’t think it will be on the main 41,000 watt signal that we’re been accustomed to. Given the relatively good success that The Fan has had on 93.7, he suspects that any B-94 return would be on an HD radio sub channel and perhaps even an FM translator.

As silly as it may seem and after hearing Venta’s take, it sounds to me like CBS-soon-to-be-Entercom might be trying to cash in on the youth of the 1980s and 1990s who just might have an HD radio in their cars or who can listen via web stream in their offices.

I’ll go one step further, the callsign for B-94 was originally WBZZ which is now assigned to it sister station at 100.7. Which begs the question, will the sub channel be on 93.7 as “KDKA-FM HD3 Pittsburgh” or on 100.7 as “WBZZ-HD2 New Kensington/Pittsburgh”… which already appears to be in place as “B-94 Replay”.