Happy 18th Birthday & Thank You!

This week marks Bloggerhythms' 18th birthday and I can't believe it's been that long!

This little outpost on the web was born in April 2005 as a place for album reviews of mostly new music. Gradually, over time, it's focus shifted toward older material but you'll still find some interesting new releases featured here on occasion.

The first review I ever posted was about a classic old Chicago album, Hot Streets. Later, this review was copied, moved, and re-used again with a more recent date to fill in a gap when there was no time to write something new. This has happened with several other very early posts that absolutely no one read because hardly anyone knew Bloggerhythms existed.

Currently, both the oldest and least read article is a review of a Matchbox 20 album, Mad Season, that was posted on April 29, 2005 and was originally written for someone else's long defunct website. In all these years it only received eighty-six total page views, and a few of those clicks most assuredly came from your congenial host. That's an average of only 4.8 clicks per year!!

On the opposite end, Bloggerhythms' most popular feature by far was published on May 12, 2011. It's called Slower Than Slow: 16 RPM Records, and as of this morning it has 86,974 page views and has generated 107 comments. I had no idea when I posted it that there were so many people interested in this long forgotten vinyl format. At one time it was the #1 listing on Google if you surfed the words "16 RPM records," but for some reason it's now completely gone from the search engines even though it continues to be my most read post every single day, regardless of anything else I write.

Bloggerhythms' readership peaked well over a decade ago and that's something that appears to be true of many privately run, independent music blogs. Fortunately, this year has shown an upswing in visits - maybe it's because I post more frequently now that I'm retired and joined Instagram in addition to Twitter. Currently, this little website is averaging around 200 hits daily - small potatoes in cyberworld for sure - but it's still enough of an incentive to keep going.

I want to thank everyone who has ever been interested in or commented on Bloggerhythms and for making this fun hobby worthwhile.

To celebrate, here is the first song from the first album I wrote about. It's also the coolest song Chicago ever did after the sad demise of Terry Kath. Unfortunately, for the great horn band, it was all downhill from there.