By Tom Faber
CSMR Editor
CHICAGO, USA -- Well, we don't know exactly how, but despite one of the most brutal winters in Chicago's recent memory, and some personal tragedies in the lives of our editorial staff, we managed to make it through our 7th full year at the Chicago Schlager Music Review.
And we still managed to stay warm and optimistic by putting up some pretty good schlager music on our pages and sharing them with our readers from throughout the English speaking world.
So for yet another year, once again - Happy Birthday to us!
We had some remarkable breakthroughs this year - we passed the all-time 1.5 million mark in readership, thanks to people in the English speaking world who actually like Germanic schlager music as much as we do -- imagine that!
We got some great new writers from Chicago and Wisconsin and California to join the team that we assembled over the previous years.
And we - for the first time - began to see a serious increase in readership from Canada, which had strangely eluded us in the previous years - and also a marked increase in readership from Italy and our first ever significant readership from Poland.
So all in all, it's been a good year. And we look forward to moving forward into our eighth year as the world's only source of information on Germanic schlager music in the English language.
So, as in all the years past, we now publish what we think are the best schlager music videos that we have showcased over the past year. Here we go!:
After a two year drought, just this past winter, we once again featured South German schlager superstar, the legendary Andrea Berg. Her on-stage performance with Austrian stars, DJ Otzi and Nik P. of her really fun C&W - themed song, Du Kannst Noch Nicht Mal Richtig Lugen (You can't even lie well.) was one of our best videos of the year:
In the Spring we showcased the Italian schlager sensations IL Volo. The young trio won the 2015 San Remo song competition and later represented Italy in the Eurovision Song Contest. They have performed on American PBS TV and have been racking up big record sales throughout continental Europe. Their emotional, almost operatic video, Grand Amore (Great Love) ranked among our best of the year:
At Christmastime, we showcased the very engaging former child star from Hesse, Marilena Kirchner's very nice wintry offering, Weihnachten am Palmerstrand (Christmastime on Palmer Square). It was one of our best videos of the year:
In January, we profiled Poland's emerging star. Malgorzata Jamrozy - aka Margaret. As one of the first Polish performers to hit it big on the German and Austrian charts, we decided to take a look at her and her very animated, O MNIE SIĘ NIE MARTW (Don't Worry About Me) turned out to be one of our most fun videos of the year:
We ran a series of articles on great German/American performers and our showcase of Linda Ronstadt's 1967 breakthrough pop hit, Different Drum, turned out to be one of our most popular videos of the year:
So that's it for our 7th year, 2017. We're now forging ahead into our eighth full year at the Chicago Schlager Music Review, with great appreciation to all of you great English speaking schlager music fans for sticking with us.
CSMR Editor
CHICAGO, USA -- Well, we don't know exactly how, but despite one of the most brutal winters in Chicago's recent memory, and some personal tragedies in the lives of our editorial staff, we managed to make it through our 7th full year at the Chicago Schlager Music Review.
 |
| Chicago had a brutally cold winter but schlager music kept us warm |
And we still managed to stay warm and optimistic by putting up some pretty good schlager music on our pages and sharing them with our readers from throughout the English speaking world.
So for yet another year, once again - Happy Birthday to us!
We had some remarkable breakthroughs this year - we passed the all-time 1.5 million mark in readership, thanks to people in the English speaking world who actually like Germanic schlager music as much as we do -- imagine that!
We got some great new writers from Chicago and Wisconsin and California to join the team that we assembled over the previous years.
And we - for the first time - began to see a serious increase in readership from Canada, which had strangely eluded us in the previous years - and also a marked increase in readership from Italy and our first ever significant readership from Poland.
So all in all, it's been a good year. And we look forward to moving forward into our eighth year as the world's only source of information on Germanic schlager music in the English language.
So, as in all the years past, we now publish what we think are the best schlager music videos that we have showcased over the past year. Here we go!:
After a two year drought, just this past winter, we once again featured South German schlager superstar, the legendary Andrea Berg. Her on-stage performance with Austrian stars, DJ Otzi and Nik P. of her really fun C&W - themed song, Du Kannst Noch Nicht Mal Richtig Lugen (You can't even lie well.) was one of our best videos of the year:
In the Spring we showcased the Italian schlager sensations IL Volo. The young trio won the 2015 San Remo song competition and later represented Italy in the Eurovision Song Contest. They have performed on American PBS TV and have been racking up big record sales throughout continental Europe. Their emotional, almost operatic video, Grand Amore (Great Love) ranked among our best of the year:
At Christmastime, we showcased the very engaging former child star from Hesse, Marilena Kirchner's very nice wintry offering, Weihnachten am Palmerstrand (Christmastime on Palmer Square). It was one of our best videos of the year:
In January, we profiled Poland's emerging star. Malgorzata Jamrozy - aka Margaret. As one of the first Polish performers to hit it big on the German and Austrian charts, we decided to take a look at her and her very animated, O MNIE SIĘ NIE MARTW (Don't Worry About Me) turned out to be one of our most fun videos of the year:
We ran a series of articles on great German/American performers and our showcase of Linda Ronstadt's 1967 breakthrough pop hit, Different Drum, turned out to be one of our most popular videos of the year:
So that's it for our 7th year, 2017. We're now forging ahead into our eighth full year at the Chicago Schlager Music Review, with great appreciation to all of you great English speaking schlager music fans for sticking with us.