New WKRP brings classic rock to Dayton, Cincinnati

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Station broadcasts on 94.5 FM in Dayton/Tipp City area

Have you ever wondered whatever became of all the great music of the 1960s, 70s and 80s? It’s living on the air in Cincinnati, at WKRP!

Launched in May of 2026, the new radio station pays tribute to the classic TV show, while featuring a massive playlist of over 2,000 classic songs from the WKRP era. With a broadcast area stretching from Sidney to northern Kentucky, the new station also features several well-known local radio personalities.

“It’s classic rock and roll from the 60s, 70s and 80s, but with a much longer, larger playlist than most stations run these days,” Station Manager and co-owner Jeff Ziessman said. “We do everything in-house. It’s locally produced, it’s locally hosted; we don’t depend on networks for anything whatsoever.”

“Dave Mason, who has been in Cincinnati radio for the last 30 or 40 years, does our morning show,” he said. “Ernie Brown, also known as the Fat Man, does mid-days. John Beaulieu the B-Man, who was on WTUE for 42 years, does the afternoon drive.”

WKRP serves both the Dayton and Cincinnati metro areas, using multiple broadcast towers to create an exceptionally large broadcast area. The station’s broadcast is a triple-simulcast, Ziessman said, available on three different frequencies, including 97.7, 94.5 and 106.7 FM.

“We have seamless coverage from Georgetown, Kentucky to well past Sidney, almost to Lima,” he said. “The 106.7 transmitter primarily serves northern Kentucky and the southern edge of Cincinnati. The 97.7 signal serves the rest of Cincinnati and the southern tip of Dayton.”

“The 94.5 signal is a Dayton signal; it’s located across the street from where Hara Arena used to be,” Ziessman said.

Designed as an alternative to corporate radio, WKRP features a much larger song library than many stations, with music that is selected by humans.

“We run about 2,000 cuts at any given time,” Ziessman said. “The average station in this format that’s corporate would run somewhere between 500-600.”

“It’s designed not to get boring,” he said. “It’s designed to be much deeper, and it’s for people who like music of this vintage, but are tired of hearing the same 500 songs over and over again.”

“These days, most radio stations are owned by huge corporate entities,” Ziessman said. “We are the only remaining FM full-power operator in the Cincinnati market; everybody else is owned by conglomerates.”

“In this day and age, local ownership is a rarity in broadcasting,” he said. “We’re pleased and proud to be preserving that end of the business. We think the best products go on the air when you actually live and work in the communities you serve.”

Launching WKRP as a real station has taken Ziessman and his partner, co-owner Randy Michaels, more than four years to accomplish. Surprisingly, this is the first time that the call letters WKRP have ever been used by an actual station in the Cincinnati market.

“I was always flabbergasted that nobody ever put those call letters on in this market before,” Ziessman said. “I know it was discussed, but nothing ever came of it.”

“There’s simply no set of call letters anywhere in radio, anywhere in the United States, that’s better known than WKRP,” he said. “We felt that adopting the WKRP call letters would give us more publicity than almost anything else that we could do.”

Veterans of the radio broadcast world, Ziessman and Michaels are both also long-time radio station owners. They purchased the WKRP call letters from a low-power FM station in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Randy is one of the most prolific broadcasters in the history of the business,” Ziessman said. “At one point, he was the CEO of a company called Jacor, which eventually became Clear Channel, which eventually became iHeart Radio.”

Ziessman has been in the radio business for 53 years, with 30 of those spent as a station owner.

“I’ve been doing this since I was 15 years old, and I’m 68,” he said. “I worked with Randy 40 years ago at Jacor; we decided we would work together on this project.”

The TV show version of WKRP aired from 1978-1982, and starred Loni Anderson, Howard Hesseman, Gordon Jump, Frank Bonner, Jan Smithers and Gary Sandy, among others. The show portrayed daily life at a fictional rock radio station, set in Cincinnati.

“It was a very popular television show,” Ziessman said. “In some ways it was gloriously inaccurate when it came to how radio actually worked, and in other ways it was very accurate, but it was certainly an entertaining show.”

“Gary Sandy, who played Andy Travis, has been working with us,” he said. “So we have kind of a tunnel back to what they were thinking when they actually produced the show. That’s been very helpful; he’s been an absolute pleasure to work with.”

Finding the show on streaming platforms can be difficult, Ziessman said, due to issues with licensing the music that was included in original broadcasts.

 “They did not license the music that they featured in that show in perpetuity, they licensed it for a fixed term of time,” Ziessman said. “Re-licensing the music has become so prohibitively expensive that they can’t do it.”

A company called Shout Factory has issued a series of WKRP DVDs, he said, but the show is still not available in syndication.

“They licensed the music for the DVD production, but of course that’s not the same as rebroadcasting it on television,” he said.

The new WKRP radio station’s broadcasts are available for streaming through iHeart Radio, and more information can be found online at www.wherethemusicwent.com.

So far, the response to the new station has been overwhelmingly positive, Ziessman said.

“We’ve had a tremendous amount of fun with this,” he said. “We’ve been in the Wall Street Journal, we’ve been on Good Morning America; People magazine did a thing on us.”

“It’s been overwhelming,” Ziessman said. “We have received literally thousands of requests, from people all over the country, because we also stream.”

“Locally, it’s been very well received, and on the national level, it’s just been incredible,” Ziessman said. “We’re very happy with the way it’s turned out.”