"Every Home Is Wired":
2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net
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Progressive Rock Today
One effect of this internal variety and even contradiction of Prog has been to limit the genre's marketability through the late 1980s, dominated as they were by Anglo-Saxon pop and various clearly defined other genres, like heavy metal. "Because any subcultures surrounding this music are so much more fragmentary and less unified than the metal subculture, ... progressive rock as a living, developing idiom has been unable to maintain mainstream commercial viability" (Macan 181). Over time, though, various factors have combined to lessen this disadvantage: as we have seen, the dominance of the pop mainstream has diminished in an increasingly segmentalised environment, while at the same time, Progressive Rock and its subcultural community have consolidated, forming a more strongly defined genre family. The Internet and other global media have been instrumental in this: along with the decrease in music production and distribution costs (partly due to the move to CDs), they have made the operation of specialty labels and retailers in a global market viable, and have also allowed the Prog community across the world to interact and exchange information -- a highly valued commodity ever since the early 1970s, due to the underground nature of the Prog community, and the lack of coverage in traditional media. Bit 23
Some signs of today's vibrant Prog community, then, are that many early and obscure Prog albums have been reissued on CD, and that there have been a number of band reunions.17 While with the expection of the King Crimson reunion in 1994 such efforts are all at the traditionalist end of the Prog spectrum, other, new bands like Djam Karet, Höyry-kone, and Il Berlione from as far afield as the USA, Finland and Japan are holding up the progressive side; additional discoveries have also been made through the development of a form of Prog archaeology that has uncovered little-known music from the 1970s, such as that of the German band Schicke Führs Fröhling or the French Shylock. This has further been aided by the new accessibility of Eastern Europe, whose Prog bands have so far been cut off from the general community. Extensive searches have also brought to light early live recordings that are now being published for the first time, cleaned up with the help of digital editing systems.18 Bit 24

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© 1998 Axel Bruns