Two disabled Christian men have joined together to build an Internet radio station that focuses exclusively on Christian "indie" artists. The station is known as Christian Indie Radio, or CiR.
(PRWEB) February 11, 2005 -- Until December 4th, 2002, Alan Seeger was just an average citizen of Northwest Arkansas. He went to work each day and tried to keep the bills paid. Then a head-on collision on Interstate 540 turned his life upside down.
After two months in a coma and a total of seven months in a series of four different hospitals, Seeger was looking at the possibility of spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair, dependent on others for his care.
Two years later, he still uses the wheelchair most of the time, but he's regained his independence -- driving, running a small graphic design business, and serving as the pastor of music at Winds Of Worship Sanctuary in Rogers, Arkansas. However, the thing that provides the greatest spark in his life these days is the increasingly popular Internet radio station that he and a fellow disabled Christian founded in September of 2004.
Seeger first met Jason Mitchener of Phoenix, Arizona in 1997 through an Internet discussion group on Christian songwriting. Mitchener was born with a rare neuromuscular disease that confines him to an electric wheelchair and requires him to use a ventilator to breathe. Despite this, he has become a force to be reckoned with, having published a devotional book and founded an e-mail devotional mailing list which has hundreds of subscribers, as well as being a talented digital artist and songwriter who has had songs recorded on CDs by three Christian music artists.
In the summer of 2004, Mitchener approached Seeger with the idea of starting an Internet radio station devoted to independent Christian artists. "Indies" is a slang term for those musical artists who lack a contract with a record company. There are thousands of indie artists around the world, many of whom have devoted the time, energy, and finances to produce polished recordings that rival major labels' releases in quality, only to find that radio stations and record stores often turn their noses up at anyone without a distribution deal. Mitchener and Seeger agreed that such a station was feasible, and a short time later, it was on the air.
The station is known as Christian Indie Radio, or CiR for short. In the brief time that it has been in existence, it has grown from a few songs that were contributed by Seeger and Mitchener's associates from the songwriters' discussion group to include, as of this writing, nearly twenty-one hours of music from over 100 different artists. The station's programming includes a two hour early morning worship music show and a program of Christian modern rock music that airs in the wee hours of the night, as well as the station's mainstay of Christian pop and rock music that fills the other seventeen hours of the day with catchy songs that lift up Christ.
"We were amazed," says Seeger. "We thought we'd give it a go and see if there was any interest. We had no idea of the response we'd get." The number of listeners has steadily increased. Christian Indie Radio is now in the top 100 Christian stations powered by Live365.com, the world's largest Internet radio network, which presently hosts upwards of 10,000 individual stations, more than 900 of which are classified as Christian.
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