Hard-Prog/Dark-Prog

Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:   Well, for me it's the best site and will continue being tha best as long as some of us work hard to try to make it the best instead of complaining against everything and finding defects where there are not.   Iván

I have nothing but the deepest respect for the hard working members of Progarchives.com ... it is indeed the #1 prog resource on the internet - thanks to the members and collabs.

But that doesn't mean that I have to agree with everything that happens here. And the collabs don't need to take my complaints personally ... whenever I'm talking about "the archives", I'm talking about the *owners* ... they're making the big decisions. Some of them are offensive to me - two obvious examples would be the advertising and the illegitimate audio samples. But neither of these problems are related to the collabs in any way.

BTW: I greatly reduced my complaining in the last few months ... I am only joining discussions about tagging because I'm interested in the subject, I'm not aggressively starting such debates anymore.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: Ivan_Melgar_M wrote: The funny thing is that despite is that despite Prog Archives has no new genres being added, no extra tags, no further experiments, we have grown enough to be the N° 1 Prog Resource in the net.   Just type Progressive Rock in Google or Yahoo and guess which site appears in the top?   Ok, the most popular website is always the best ... Pardon me, but the archives seem more and more like this guy to me:

I agree with some forum members that we don't need descriptive flags such are "dark", "melodic", "atmospheric" or whatever, but what about gothic/industrial genre? I'm not big fan of that genre, but some bands are melting this genre with prog. For example Einsturzende Neubauten and Nurse With Wound (both not included on PA) are very prog but they don't fit into RIO or psychedelic subgenre...

Ivan_Melgar_M wrote: The funny thing is that despite is that despite Prog Archives has no new genres being added, no extra tags, no further experiments, we have grown enough to be the N° 1 Prog Resource in the net.   Just type Progressive Rock in Google or Yahoo and guess which site appears in the top?

Ok, the most popular website is always the best ...

Pardon me, but the archives seem more and more like this guy to me:

The funny thing is that despite is that despite Prog Archives has no new genres being added, no extra tags, no further experiments, we have grown enough to be the N° 1 Prog Resource in the net.

Edited by Ivan_Melgar_M - November 19 2006 at 22:48

^Thanks! I'm not saying that it's a perfect solution though ... play around with the new chart builder on my website (front page -> sidebar) and you'll see that assigning tags on a fine grained level can lead to somewhat peculiar results.

For the archives I would recommend a less complex solution ... how about this:

- Reduce the number of genres to something like that:

- Prog Rock
- Jazz-Fusion
- Prog Metal
- Avant-Garde

And then add a number of tags.

- Symphonic
- Artistic ("Art ...")
- Spacey ("Space ...")
- Psychedelic
- Post ("Post ...")
- Folk ("Folk ...")
- Italian
- Prog-Related
- Non-Prog (for the non-prog albums in the discographies of Prog/Prog-Related artists)
- Zeuhl
- RIO
- Canterbury

and then some new tags to further describe the music:

- Melodic
- Atonal
- Experimental
- Hard
- Dark
- Melancholic
- Uplifting
- Cheesy/Fantasy
- Neo-classical

Each album is assigned to one genre and to any number of these tags (each tag is implemented as a checkbox in the database).

I doubt that this will be implemented any time soon - but it's what I would do.

Ok, I give up ... the idea of fixed genres has been cemented in peoples' brains.

Edited by MikeEnRegalia - November 19 2006 at 05:44

rileydog22 wrote: The genres are most useful helping people find music they might like.  Dark Prog would not do this; a VdGG fan looking in Dark Prog might find themselves surrounded by Prog Death Metal and Prog Black Metal.  Perhaps bands could be placed in multiple subgenres; Atomic Rooster could be Hard Prog and Art Rock, or said Prog Black Metal band could be put in both Prog Metal and Dark Prog.

This is exactly what would be solved by tagging.

Imagine you have the following set of tags:

Hard, Dark, Art, Prog, Rock, Black Metal

and you could apply any number of them to any artist. So you could "build" genres for each artist - one could be "Dark Prog Rock", another could be "Dark Black Metal" ...

Ivan_Melgar_M wrote: Then we must create Soft Prog/Bright Prog.

so do we have to create Camera Prog, progressive acoustic, Pre-rock, proto-garde and prog plastic?

A variant isn't justified by the name, you have to stablish the parameters.


Edited by Revan - November 18 2006 at 19:33

rileydog22 wrote: The genres are most useful helping people find music they might like.  Dark Prog would not do this; a VdGG fan looking in Dark Prog might find themselves surrounded by Prog Death Metal and Prog Black Metal.

Rather the other way 'round I'd say. Prog Death/Black fans would find stuff like VdGG or King Crimson, band which would disappoint them. Prog Death and Prog Black should of course be kept in Prog Metal if the Dark Prog category ever sees the light of day.