Classic Rock Presents Prog & others

^I'm with you Doc. I don't think this mag is the train wreck that people make it out to be. A bit expensive perhaps, but it is a way to keep in touch with bands that I never would have heard of without it.

I buy about 1 in 6 when there's something that interests me

Regarding the Yak snafu....that is indeed unfortunate. But it might be a problem with communication at the magazine or whoever is in charge of that dept and not a reflection on the whole staff.

dr wu23 wrote: Well, frankly I'm not sure why there is so much animosity to Prog Rock mag.....I recently picked up the May issue with Genesis and Gabriel's split and generally found the article and the issue  interesting. Sure they need better coverage of more obscure groups but they do cover a lot of ground and they also review a lot of unknown or lesser known bands.

Kati wrote: Say what you will and believe, so will I The bottom line for me is that if they request a band to post them cd's (two cd's even to different people), months before year end, thereafter being notified by their marketing department saying it's past the year end release (months later) but should the band be interested in paying for publicity they will be featured on their next issue? This to me seems so wrong, it is not nice nor a good business practice.    bah!   P.S. Famous bands on the cover of the mag makes perfect sense, I am not contesting this at all.

Komandant Shamal wrote: yaksongs wrote: Hi Kati et al - just saw this thread - Interestingly my band YAK was featured in about issue 6 of the CRPP mag and we had a track on the CD that came with it - I followed this up by advertising with them for a few issues - However in June this year I let them know about our new release "Quest for the Stones" which has had some great reviews so far - but despite several e mails - not a dicky bird in responce - I sent them a nice messsage on facebook too, but even this was ignored - totally agree with much of what I am seeing on this thread in respect of the mag - such a shame that they have this attitude to "non famous" bands - it is a struggle to get the word out - on a professional level as a "Client" to not even to get a reply from them I find completely unnaceptable ..& frankly offensive - my 2p :) Thats really shame that they ignored your mails. There couldnt be any excuse for something like that.

I suspect that these folks gets rather a lot of email. By the 2000 or so bands that release new music each year, by the 2000 or so bands that released stuff the year before and the 2000 or so that are going to release new music soon, by many of the 20.000 or so people who read the magazine, by venues and clubs that host live shows, by everyone with a prog or proggy radio show that wants to have a word or to say a word in their pages, by all kinds of promotors and marketing people. And this, presumably, is just scratching at the iceberg.

The question is how well they are staffed I guess. It's not an organization with a hell of a lot of revenue, so if they have more than a skeleton crew to handle requests I'd be rather surprised. So yeah, I can easily see multiple reasons for why emails are left unanswered, the key of them being that they have to make priorities.

As the magazine is under an umbrella (Team Rock) I'd suspect that they share personell with other magazines, including the people who make a call for what emails to distribute to what staff. The bottleneck would presumably be there, someone basically being a digital receptionist for multiple magazines. As this is an assumption and not knowledge, it would be interesting if someone knew if that was the case or not of course.

The prog magazine is pretty alright. It just needs to get better at giving attention to the music outside of United Kingdom.