The 1980s and 1990s
The station continued with a Top 40 Format until the early 1980s when, facing the emergence of FM competition, the station evolved to more of an Adult Contemporary format. By 1983 they leaned rock and roll oldies while still playing AC songs. They also added talk radio shows in the evenings by 1984.
In 1986, the WKBW stations were broken up as a result of Capital Cities' purchase of the American Broadcasting Company. WKBW radio was sold to Price Communications, who subsequently changed the station's call letters to the current WWKB, mainly in order to keep the long-standing "KB" slogan (the former calls remained on now-former sister station WKBW-TV, which Capital Cities/ABC would sell to Queen City Broadcasting). In 1987 the station moved to a full service oldies format and in 1988, the station became a talk radio station and had a variety of business, sports, news, and talk programming until 2003.
During the "talk" era the station, between 1993 and 1996, tried to launch a hot talk format on the station, acquiring J. R. Gach from WGR as the afternoon drive show and established syndicated hot talkers The Howard Stern Show (by this time now almost exclusively on the FM dial), G. Gordon Liddy, Laura Schlessinger, The Fabulous Sports Babe, Tom Leykis and (briefly, before Gach's arrival) Don and Mike. John Otto hosted a late night program in this era. Stern's and Gach's presence was not enough to revive KB's ratings in what was then a three way news-talk battle also involving market-leading WBEN and contender WGR, which would itself later switch to its current format of sports talk and play by play. So by 1996 the format was flipped again to country music (this despite there being three other country stations in Buffalo, WYRK, WNUC and WXRL). Following that in 1998 was an all sports format, which also failed, and eventually, syndicated business talk (which proved unpopular in the troubled economy of Western New York but cheap to maintain).
Price Communications presided over the collapse of its entire radio portfolio including WWKB and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992. After a major company reorganization, WWKB was sold to Keymarket Communications (which also acquired WBEN radio from locally based owners at a premium price) in 1994. Keymarket then sold both WWKB and WBEN to St. Louis-based River City Broadcasting in 1995. Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired WWKB and WBEN in 1996 through its purchase of River City. In 1999, Sinclair decided to exit radio station ownership, selling most of its radio stations, including WWKB, WBEN and WGR (the latter being acquired by Sinclair in 1997), to Entercom Communications.