Progressive Rock, a part of a certain culture?

"music snobs" and "nerds", well..as well...even it's somehow true about myself, and certainly the nerd part of it (not least according to my step daughter ), I can't really say anything about that as I don't have sufficient knowledge about really many Prog fans. But like so many others, I've made a little poll for the active PA members, only not about bands or music itself but about our musical taste, and I can tell a couple of things on that basis. 

About 70 persons have replied at this point of time, and about two third of us are most interested in prog (as oneself define it), 7 persons are most interested in non-prog while about one third couldn't really say which means something like they are as much interested in prog as in non-prog. 

What can one conclude on that basis, which is of course very slender? Well, to begin with, I'll presume that the active PA members are some of the Prog listeners which are relatively mostly interested in Prog. Yet, more than one third of us are at least as much interested in non-Prog as Prog. That can indicate that a rather large part of all Prog listeners have to high degree other music interests than Prog, so the very dedicated Prog fans are only a minor part of all the Prog listeners.

By the way, if anybody has yet not seen this poll ("progger or non-progger?") and all the replies there, I can certainly recommend to read them, as they are very interesting and tell quite a lot about the active members approach to Prog and other kinds of music, so there's much more to read than I very shortly mentioned here.

No, but you made me think about that it's better to say "we" than "they", thanks. 

And if my comment to you about the three big Italians was a bit fierce, sorry for that.  

I guess, no need for this one now. 

I changed the title after Cristi's last posts but at a very early stage stage of the thread I wrote in one of my posts: "The notion of "subculture" uses to imply many different things but I use it just as a help to point at some possible things which might exist besides the music. So no need to think much about the notion itself." 

And I wrote this as well in my OP as "Edit".

 

And sorry to tell you that, Heart of the Matter, but I've found it necessary to change the thread title because most people didn't seem to notice what the thread precisely was supposed to try to answer, and instead focused much on the notion of subculture. So in fact, I can tell as well that I changed the thread title right after this post of yours.

I like very much to hear that, Heart of the Matter, and in fact I began to think much in line with that at a quite early stage of this thread. Except from, though, I still think that the notion of "culture" is very usefull because it points at that large variety of "things" which it could be good to investigate, in order to get some good ideas about what kind of phenomenon Prog as music is a part of and can't exist without, including that which can be said about us, both as musicians and fans, or just listeners. 

But what do you think of these specific questions, I've mentioned at a rather early stage of this thread as good examples of what would be good to consider, and could you ask some other good questions besides those: 

"What does motivate mostly the musicians?

Which ideologies are they most in to?
How large a part of the listeners is most into Prog and not other genres?
How important is Prog in their life?

How much do the listeners identify themselves with the music and the musicians?"

I'd say, as soon there are some musicians which can be connected to some specific music (in this case Prog), and as soon there are some listeners to listen to it, there's some Prog culture because as soon there are people there's culture due to the fact that human beings can't exist without culture. So it's inevitable that the Prog culture exists, and the only question is how this culture looks, and not least how much of the same culture can be said concerning the musicians and the listeners respectively.

I don't know how much of this thread you've read, but in some post Jaketes has told quite a lot about what can be said to be a part of the culture concerning musicians. While in one of the post on the top of this page (6), I told about the results of a poll I've made for the active PA members which can be said to be a small part of the Prog culture which concerns the listeners. 

NO!, of course not, it's just to get a bit more knowledgeable about and become more aware of the topic, and I must say, I was hoping for some better results than those so far.