Is Prog fan base getting older and older?

cstack3 wrote: What is remarkable to me is that ANY young fans get into prog from the 1970s!  The music is over 40 years old.  When I was in college, listening to CTTE etc., I would have been kicked out of the room had I tried to play music that was 40 years old (1930's vintage).  Some of that was very good (big band jazz, primitive blues etc) but we didn't sit around and listen to it!   I listen for progressive influences in modern music, and there are quite a few if you look hard enough.    However, the modern stage spectacles of twitching, twerking dancers detracts from my enjoyment of the music, if that is even possible!  I quite like acts like Lady GaGa, but the emphasis upon dance is rather annoying to me.   Then again, I'm a guitarist.  No problem at all with bands like Muse, Tool etc., they carry the torch of the 70s.

Edited by AFlowerKingCrimson - February 24 2018 at 16:30

Yes, the base is getting older - but all music genres are too (look at some of the old punk rockers at some reunion gigs in cities up and down the country). Each picks up younger, enlightened recruits, but they will never compensate for most of us growing older and sadly some of us passing on. The audience for the classic prog bands can be depressingly grey, balding, rounded, slower walking and still predominately male (although I do think some of our wives or partners now join us more to see what our obsession is all about - my wife will seeing Camel for the first time later this year, for example)

Where I do have faith that prog will continue beyond the next couple of decades, is the support we give to those younger prog or post-rock bands to keep going and at least break even financially. We have a duty to allow this generation to prosper, so they can have a chance to catch and keep younger fans, who will then appreciate the modern and classic and see the strengths in both. Hoping to see a much younger audience soon when I watch Steven Wilson or even Marillion in the next month or so.

In the end though, it will all fade, sadly - so let's enjoy it while we can. I can dream that in several hundred years' time a young couple will discover a dusty old slab of vinyl and hear a song called Supper's Ready, Close to the Edge or Thick as a Brick for the first time, and love them like we did - as we might have done yourselves with Mozart. Beethoven or Mahler etc. from centuries earlier ourselves.

...you think that might be an idea for an album concept for the likes of Rush or Dream Theater?   

I sat next to a pretty old guy at a prog concert once, and it was something like ten years ago.

Don't you think the nature of society being entirely nostalgic, as being sort of contradictory to this thread? 

About fifties interesting music everybody who is interested in experimental music should check out Harry Partch. It´s not just interesting music, he even made own instruments that are based on the ancient instruments. Really great & weird sounds!

Music just seem not to be as much passion to the most people´s as it has been. Of course there always been quite little people who it means as much as it means to me.

^to getting older is not automatically means you have more money, at the moment I have quite as little money as I have when I started my studies.

^No, they didn´t listen it, they´re doing it all together!