This station's stream address traces back to SmoothJazz.com, a service with a real claim to internet radio history: it was founded by a broadcaster who had already spent two decades on some of the format's most respected FM signals before she ever touched a streaming server.
From Cannery Row to the Internet
SmoothJazz.com was founded by Sandy Shore, a radio personality who began her on-air career at just 15 years old in 1979 on a station near John Steinbeck's Cannery Row in Monterey, California, according to profiles collected on SmoothJazz.com's own site. Over the following two decades she worked her way through nearly a dozen stations up and down the California coast, including two of the format's most storied outlets: KTWV The Wave in Los Angeles and KKSF in San Francisco. Frustration with the instability of terrestrial radio jobs eventually pushed her toward a different idea entirely, building a smooth jazz station that lived online instead of on a single city's dial.
A First for the Format
Shore launched what became SmoothJazz.com's global platform in 2000, working alongside co-founder Donna K. Phillips, and the result was notable beyond its programming. The site is widely credited, per its own history pages, as the first woman-owned and woman-operated internet radio station in the world, and among the first internet radio outlets to feature album art and click-to-buy links back when that was a novel idea for streaming audio. Shore has continued building on that foundation since, now serving as a Recording Academy member and running the related SmoothLounge.com alongside the flagship station.
Still Rooted in the Genre's FM Golden Age
What separates SmoothJazz.com from many internet-only competitors is that its founder learned the format on the stations that essentially invented commercial smooth jazz radio in the first place. The Wave and KKSF were both foundational to the genre's rise in the 1980s and 90s, and that on-air pedigree still shapes the station's programming instincts today, blending mellow instrumental staples with newer contemporary jazz artists.
Why It's Worth Tuning In
This is smooth jazz radio built by someone who lived the format's FM heyday before helping invent its internet-era future, a station with a real claim to being first in a category most listeners never think to ask about.