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WDZH (98.7 FM broadcasting, "Alt 98-7") is a commercial radio station licensed to Detroit and serving the Metro Detroit media market in Southeastern Michigan. It is owned by Audacy, Inc. and airs an alternative rock radio format.
The station's offices and studios are located on American Drive in Southfield. The transmitter is located near Lyndon Street at Cloverdale Street in the City of Detroit. WDZH broadcasts with an effective radiated power (ERP) of 50,000 from an antenna at 463 feet in height above average terrain (HAAT).
Studios were located on Lyndon Avenue. The station sold segments of time to local and national religious leaders, who presented religious instruction and also sought donations on the air to support their ministry.
The new WLLZ became an instant hit. "Wheels" had one of the most successful premieres in Detroit radio history. It debuted at #2 (behind only WJR) in total persons 12+ in the Fall 1980 Nielsen Audio ratings for Detroit radio. It also posted #1 ratings in the teen, 18-34 and 18-49 listener demographics. Detroit's other rockers were hit hard, particularly 106.7 WWWW (W4), which, having been a top 10-rated station just a year earlier (and had ranked as high as #2 in the spring 1979 ratings), had tumbled completely out of the top 20 by the fall of 1980. In January 1981, just days after the fall Arbitron ratings were released, W4 changed formats from rock to country music, and terminated morning man Howard Stern, whose show had been crushed by his WLLZ competition of John Larson and Jeff Young.
The rock format on WYCD also was switched for a Top 40/CHR format in 1982, leaving WLLZ and WRIF to go head-to-head in the AOR format for the rest of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, with WLLZ occasionally beating the heritage rocker in the 12+ ratings. In an Ann Arbor News article in 1987, Michael Solon, the station's general manager at the time of the rock format's launch, credited WLLZ's success to the perception that the station featured less chatter and took a more mass-appeal, hit-oriented approach to its rock music than competing stations: "It was a wonderful time, making such a splash with an all-new station. I was no genius. I just figured that if the other stations were awfully chatty and going four songs deep on albums, we would do well by playing album-music hits." In April 1986, Legacy Broadcasting bought WLLZ.
In 1988, WLLZ also introduced the nation's first weekly sports talk show on an FM rock and roll station, The Sunday Sports Albom, hosted by Mitch Albom. In December 1989, Westinghouse Broadcasting bought the station. (Westinghouse was merged into CBS in 1995, with the radio division being renamed Infinity Broadcasting in 1997).
WLLZ saw its fortunes slip in the early 1990s with the emergence of "alternative rock" groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, which drove many of the 1980s "hair bands" off the charts. A format tweak from AOR to modern rock in June 1995 (which put the station in competition with CIMX-FM and WDVD) failed to reverse the station's dropping ratings.
The flip put the station in competition with the similarly formatted WDMK, until the latter flipped to urban in August 1996.
In December 2005, WVMV's parent company, Infinity Broadcasting, was renamed CBS Radio.
The "AMP Radio" format featured a tight rotation of mainly current hits, similar to Mike Joseph's Hot Hits formatted stations of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which had been heard locally on WDVD.
On February 2, 2017, CBS Radio announced it would merge with Entercom. The merger was approved on November 9, 2017, and was consummated on November 17.
Beginning in 2019 and ending the following year, WDZH carried Christmas music for the holiday season, replacing sister station WOMC as Entercom's home for the programming within its Detroit cluster. As with its main format, it competed primarily with WNIC, which, as mentioned above, has historically been the most prominent station for Christmas music in Detroit.
Such a move had been rumored to take place since shortly after Entercom took over the station in November 2017, as Entercom had flipped several other "Amp Radio" branded stations across the country to the format, including the aforementioned WNYL, shortly after their merger with CBS Radio; however, rival iHeartMedia pulled a preemptive move around that same time, flipping WDTW-FM (now WLLZ) to the format and its own "Alt" branding with little warning.
During late December 2021, the station (and many of Audacy's other alternative stations across the U.S.) began tweaking the playlist away from a current-heavy presentation and adding more alternative rock-based tracks from the 1990s and 2000s. Until September 2021, the station aired the syndicated "Cane & Corey" morning show from WINS-FM in New York. Until August 2022, the station aired the syndicated "Church of Lazlo" afternoon show from KRBZ in Kansas City.
On March 28, 2014, the station activated its HD3 sub-channel, and began airing a modern rock format, branded as Area 9-8-7, The Real Alternative. In April 2016, WDZH-HD3 flipped to Rhythmic Adult Contemporary as Party 98-7. In August 2019, WDZH-HD3 flipped to "Channel Q," Entercom's talk radio/EDM service for the LGBT community. Channel Q eventually moved to HD2 which resulted in the HD3 subchannel being turned off.
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