"Every Home Is Wired":
3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net
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General Structures of rec.music.progressive and alt.music.yes
However, what can be gained from a quantitative overview of rec.music.progressive and alt.music.yes are some basic facts: over the three-month period studied in detail here (6 Feb. to 5 May 1998), there were 13599 posts in r.m.p and 9080 posts in a.m.y, averaging 4533 and 3027 posts per month or 153 and 102 posts per day, respectively.3 Postings under 1840 different names appeared in r.m.p, with 1106 in a.m.y; there were 2647 different subjects in r.m.p, and 1627 in a.m.y. (These data, along with the respective top fifteen posters and subjects, are listed in Appendix A.1.) Bit 6
These basic figures place both groups among the larger newsgroups on Usenet; by comparison, rec.music.misc only averaged about 39 posts per day in the same period, for example, including crossposts (messages in r.m.p and a.m.y are largely unique to these groups, or crossposted only to other Prog-related groups). This is likely to be an outcome of their -- in spite of the difficulty of formulating what Progressive Rock is or is not -- relatively clearly defined topics (also reflected in the newsgroups' names). Obviously, such strong participation is also a sign of a lively community: for all the caution with which the figures must be approached, it emerges quite clearly from the data that both r.m.p and a.m.y have a core group of frequent participants of whom the top fifteen contribute a significant amount of postings (23 and 42 percent, respectively), while less frequent posters still remain important contributors, as the total amount of participating users shows. Among these less frequent posters are also some community members which stand out due to their individual backgrounds: these include artists and mail-order operators.4 Again with a caveat about the relation between user names and participant identities, the list of frequent posters also emerges as an almost exclusively male group. This underlines the present gender bias of both the Internet and the Progressive Rock subculture. Bit 7

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© 1998 Axel Bruns