Is Prog Getting Bigger?

Don't forget also that The Who is prog related now, although The Who, with the exception of a few songs at studio albums, were an antithesis to prog before punk hysteria

All genres of music could make a claim of "getting bigger" when the data chosen to support the hypothesis is selective - whether there are more or fewer bands in any given genre is something that can never be determined because it is a statistic that has never been collated. What we have is greater access to bands that would have otherwise remained known only to a relatively small number of people. We have no way of knowing how many such bands existed before "instant global access" became the norm. We also have no actual verified data on how many of these lesser known bands reach a measurably wider audience or how that compares to historical data. While the audience count could be an indication that a particular genre of music is getting bigger, self-created web-presence is most certainly not. It is one thing to have YouTube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Facebook, LastFM accounts but it is quite another to measure that in audience count or album sales. Since the world population is growing and the proportion of that population that has access to music is also growing then audience numbers should be increasing by a similar proportion across all genres of music. To gage then if a particular genre is actually growing (rather than tracking with increased global audience population along with every other genre of music) then audience share relative to other genres needs to be considered as this is a more reliable measure than simply counting audience numbers, but even here the data to support any claims simply isn't available. Prog Rock is getting bigger but then so is every other form of music, including Polynesian Nose Flute music.

One inescapable observation is that any increase in overall volume (of Prog bands) is partly due to the genre becoming broader (rather than deeper) - for example when the bulk of the new suggestions are in the crossover subgenres (Art Rock, Metal, Jazz Rock/Fusion, Prog Folk, Electronic, Avant, Psych, etc.,) which is a logical consequence of the inclusive (née eclectic) nature of Progressive Rock as a music genre, then this could (and probably does) give a false impression that the genre is in growth. That almost twenty years have elapsed since Indie bands like Radiohead and Mansun ventured into the realm of Progressive Rock and still the 'are they/aren't they' arguments persist, which suggests that this debate will continue for many years to come for the newer arrivals into the genre. Sideways expansion of a genre does not necessarily indicate that it is actually getting any bigger, as counter intuitive as that seems, it is merely another area that has insufficient data to make a claim either way. Even to suggest that the genre is getting deeper as well as broader lacks the measured data to support such a notion, but a measure of that at least would go some way towards verifying actual growth over perceived growth.

It is this paucity of actual data that brings us to the current Swiftian state of defiantly sitting in Ivory Towers hurling unprovable 'facts' in support of unknowable claims that are nothing more than assumptions based upon selective perceptions.

How successful is modern success? For example a brief YouTube survey of iamthemoring suggest that they average 51,000 views and 64 comments - compared to The Tea Club's 2000 views and 9 comments but both these pale in comparison to Anathema's 640,000 views and 500 comments. Anathema are not in the "big league" by any means, neither as a Prog Band nor as an Alt Rock band yet they are magnitudes (i.e., multiples of 10 times) more "successful" if these crudely gathered statistics are to be believed. Of course we get another magnitude shift when we then go to that other famously not-Prog Prog band Pink Floyd's latest non-hit single (6,000,000 views and 5000 comments). As Homer once said - you can prove anything with facts.