WLS-FM 94.7 streams classic hits live from Chicago, focused heavily on the 1970s and early 1980s, and you can listen free right now on Radio Shuffle, no sign-up needed. Owned today by Cumulus Media and branded as Chicago's Classic Hits, the station carries one of the most storied call signs in American radio, even though it took decades of name changes to actually hold onto it.
The call letters themselves trace back to 1924, when Sears, Roebuck and Company founded WLS-AM with an abbreviation standing for "World's Largest Store," a reference to the company's own Chicago headquarters. For its first 36 years the station served a rural Midwestern audience as the self-described Prairie Farmer station, after the agricultural magazine that bought it from Sears in 1928. Everything changed on May 2, 1960, when WLS-AM switched to full-time pop music and spent the next three decades as one of the biggest Top 40 hit-makers in American radio, built around a lineup of legendary disc jockeys that included Dick Biondi, Larry Lujack, John Records Landecker, and Bob Sirott, before the AM station moved to all-talk programming in 1989.
The FM side of that story is messier. WLS's FM sister signal launched January 1, 1948, as WENR-FM, becoming WLS-FM in 1964 before ABC renamed it WDAI in the early 1970s to keep the AM and FM identities separate. Over the following decades the frequency cycled through a dizzying run of call signs and formats, WRCK, WYTZ, WKXK, WXCD, WZZN, moving through disco, Top 40, talk, country, classic rock, alternative rock, and oldies as owners chased whatever format the Chicago market seemed to want next.
The WLS-FM name finally came back in June 2008, a deliberate move to reconnect the frequency with WLS-AM's famous broadcasting heritage rather than keep cycling through disposable branding. Since 2012, the station has settled into its current identity as a dedicated classic hits outlet built around 1970s and early 1980s staples, a format built explicitly to carry forward the spirit of the AM station's hit-radio glory years using the decade of music that soundtracked it.
For listeners who want the hits that defined Chicago radio's biggest era, WLS-FM 94.7 streams free on Radio Shuffle, no sign-up required.