The very first issue of the Rock Report mag had the English band Dare on the cover and hit the streets way back in May 1989. During its existence the mag underwent many changes. Up to issue 14 Rock Report was nothing more than a copied fanzine with an edition limited to a couple of 100 copies. Slowly but surely however, the circulation kept growing to the extent that in 1991 it was decided to go in print. A cheap printer was quickly found and although the delivered quality was rather poor, with every issue of the mag released, the circulation kept on growing.

Another big step forward came in 1997 when the Rock Report staff decided to go on board with a professional printing-office. A better decision couldn't have been made, because the sales figures started to grow considerably. Artists, bands, labels, record and management companies started to see Rock Report as THE reference in the Benelux and so more and more people began asking (some of them even begged) us: "When will you publish Rock Report in English?" Realising that English is not our mother tongue, we felt reluctant to the idea at first and so, we didn't dare to take that risky step. However, early 2000 pressure from website visitors from all over the world as well as from many acts and labels became so high that we plucked up courage and finally decided to switch from Dutch to English.

June 2000 was another milestone in the history of Rock Report: our very first issue written in English (issue 45) finally hit the streets! Both the magazine and the website, which was set up in 1996, are put together by a small group of extremely enthusiastic lovers of AOR, melodic rock/metal and progressive rock/metal who are doing all work for free. Rock Report is indeed a non-profit organisation, only formed to promote our favourite (but underground) styles of music.

With the internet becoming more and more important, at the beginning of 2002 it was decided to stop publishing the magazine (issue 50 was our final one) in order to concentrate on the Rock Report website alone. At the end of June a domain name - http://www.rockreport.be - was registered and a couple of weeks later the first version of the totally revamped website was online.

Statistics from last year – 2008 – prove that our website is really going strong: 261,655 unique visitors - 529,303 visits - 2,180,433 pages visited and no less than 16,061,373 hits!

Which brings us again to May 2009 and the idea of publishing this totally free – we’re a non-profit organisation after all – “Rock Report favourites of all time” as a kind of gift to all who followed us in the past twenty years.

The selection of the 600 acts is based on the many polls that Rock Report has been organising in the past two decades. The more albums an artist/band got in the top-40 of those yearly polls and the higher they climbed on the ladder, the more points this artist/band has been gathering. With a total of 493 points Journey is proclaimed the absolute winner.

From each act – artist or band – only one album was chosen as their absolute best. And believe me: it was not always easy to make that all important choice. Still I’m pretty sure that you will be agreeable to at least 75% of my choices.

From the 589 acts that were originally selected, I scrapped 11 of them because their style of music didn’t fit with what we usually cover here at Rock Report. Some examples: Kate Bush, The Doors, Megadeth and Nevermore. To come to a total of exactly 600 acts, I have added 22 artists/bands, who failed to reach one or even more top-40s of our yearly poll. Among them are such great acts like Diving For Pearls, Lita Ford, Guardian, Idle Cure, Pallas, Gregg Rolie, Santers, Starship, Tangier and Zero.

On the next 50 pages (numbered 3 - 52) you will find the covers of the 600 carefully selected albums, together with their ranking, name of the artist/band, album title and year of release. From page 53 onward you will find a complete index, with even more information per album.

In case you fill the need to give comment on whatever you see or read here, you can reach me at chris@rockreport.be.

Enjoy browsing through this pamphlet and don’t forget to check out the albums that are (still) missing in your personal collection.

And let me end with a tip: if you don’t know which albums to load your iPod with, take advantage of this – hopefully impressive – list! :)