About Us
New Age Christmas Radio began as an experiment in Internet streaming in 2002. I had installed a Shoutcast server, and was looking for some good material to test it out with. Armed with my Shoutcast streaming encoder plugin, I loaded up what seemed like the most appropriate music for the time of year, and let it fly. I just wanted to test out how the whole thing worked. What I didn’t realize was that the option to make my stream “public” was checked, and it didn’t take long for folks visiting the Shoutcast website to begin listening.
I quickly maxed out the 32-connection default limit of the Shoutcast server, so I expanded the limit to 100 connections, which also eventually maxed out. Unfortunately, at a bit rate of 96K per stream, it didn’t take long for my ISP to notice me.
Since that first, year, I have been looking for ways to “continue the tradition” of New Age Christmas. I usually fire it up around Thanksgiving, and turn it off a few weeks into the new year (when listenership dropps off).
In the meantime, I began looking into other endeavors involving streaming audio on the Internet. One day, while having lunch with a musician friend, she began complaining about how difficult it is for independent musicians to get adequate airplay on traditional radio stations, and I knew I had found a “niche” format for a new Internet radio station. Soon afterward, a small group of us formed Magic Mojo Productions, LLC, and KC Cafe Radio first began broadcasting online on May 30, 2008. The basic premise behind KC Cafe Radio is, if you enjoy live music in a coffee shop-style setting, you will enjoy the music you hear on KC Cafe Radio.
Operating a full-time online radio station has taught me a lot about running a business, and even more about things like PHP (a code I still profess to know little about, but just enough to get me in trouble), as well as the technical side of producing and presenting great audio. And, as you can see, I have brought a lot of that knowledge back over to New Age Christmas Radio!