Since late 2002, Frank Yang, the owner/operator/writer for the music review weblog called ChromeWaves has turned his passion for music into a “second full-time job”. Beyond writing really informative music reviews, Frank shares news and links to MP3’s for most of the bands featured.

His own stats link indicates that he receives about 1,600 visitor each day, which puts him the top 25 music blog websites, according to Hype Machine.  ChromeWaves is a part of the BlogAds advertising networks, so if you have the cash to spare, be sure and include this website in your a la carte order.  According to Alexa, half the traffic for this Canadian blogger is coming from outside the US.  QuantCast seems to put the volume of US readers at only about a quarter of total traffic (~10k U.S. Visitors per month).  While some might see this as a disadvantage, I think this global diversity is an amazing way for ANY band, regardless of geography, to be seen by the world at large.  Technorati gives this music blog an Authority Rank of 281, which would likely put Frank in the Top 40 of all music review blogs that Technorati monitors. The Alexa traffic ranking for the site, over the past three months has it at 184k, an impressive score for ANY website. And according to Google, there are over 28,000 websites linking to ChromeWaves.net.

What’s unquestionable is Mr. Yang’s amazing dedication to bringing great music to light for so many years, and making ChromeWaves (a name taken from a song from one of his favorite bands, Ride) an important consideration for bands of many kinds.  Recent reviews this month included; Land of Talk, Zeroes, Friendly Fires, Cut Off Your Hands, Woodpigeon, Jealous Girlfriends, Sky Larkin, Emmy The Great, Ida Maria and more.  What I love about this blog is that Frank infuses news, tour dates, video links and mp3 files within his almost daily postings.  Really great stuff.

If this sounds like a man you want to make contact with, please do NOT send him MP3 attachments.  A simple email with a link to your MySpace/Facebook or website URL will suffice.  Email your message with link to submissions at chrome waves dot net.  I’m not including a direct email link, because he didn’t and I don’t want to be responsible for spamming this already very busy man.

-pjc

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The result is a very easy to understand and access set of charts that should put Billboard magazine to shame.

Beyond being an solid source for the popular music being covered by thousands of music bloggers, Hype Machine also has a player built into the bottom of their page which preloads with the song at the top of the particular chart you’ve selected.  Chart options include; Latest, Popular, Radio and Spy.  While Latest and Popular should be self-explanatory, Radio is actually monitoring songs beings played by online stations.  Spy is simply collecting random mp3 tracks from the music blogs being frequently checked – consider your “feeling lucky” option.

While I’ve only visited the Hype Machine a few times, most of the music I’ve heard has been heavy on the dance, remixes and mash-ups.  I will not claim to be an expert on current musical trends, but there may be some genres left out of their blog rotation.  One of the important elements that should be understood is the SEARCH function.  Type in an artist you know and not only will you find tracks available for both streaming and downloading, but you’ll also find references to other SIMILAR sounding artists.  A sound way to discover new sounds.

We will use this resource, along with other tools, to help us target the most popular music blogs to review.

-pjc