WZYP
Radio station in Athens, Alabama, United States
WZYP (104.3 FM, "104.3 'ZYP") is a top 40 (CHR) music-formatted radio station licensed to serve Athens, Alabama, and broadcasting in the Huntsville, Alabama, area. The station is owned by Cumulus Media and formerly broadcast in HD. The broadcast signal can be heard throughout northern Alabama and much of southern central Tennessee. Its studios are in Athens and its transmitter is in Madison, Alabama.
01History
The radio station was founded by the Dunnavant family of Athens, Alabama (which remains its city of license), as WJOF. Prior to its 1978 format change to Top 40/CHR, WJOF featured a mixture of beautiful music and, at night, country music.
On June 10, 1980, the call letters were switched to the current WZYP. Through most of the 1980s, WZYP was northern Alabama's top-rated station, dethroned only by WDRM when WDRM's country experienced a resurgence in popularity among young people in the late 1980s and 1990s. Nonetheless, it has remained among the Huntsville market's most-listened-to stations through the mid-2000s.
02Ownership
On April 1, 2003, WZYP was sold by Athens Broadcasting Co. (William E. Dunnavant, president) to Cumulus Broadcasting Inc. as part of a four-station deal with a sale price of $22 million in cash and Cumulus common stock. The acquisition of the stations was completed in July 2003. WZYP remains co-owned with former Dunnavant stations WVNN and WUMP, in addition to WHRP and WWFF-FM. This ended a 55-year presence in the market by Athens Broadcasting, founded in 1948 by Homer Felix "Pap" Dunnavant.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “WZYP”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- WZYP 104.3WZYP logo.png by Unknown author, Fair use
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