'Lost Gems' from the Cubic Zirconia Mines

I was using the internet to research a review recently and came across what seemed like a million blogger sites which all claim to have found hitherto 'lost gems' from the psyche/prog realm. Some of these sites allow you to hear short samples of the albums in question but I found in almost all cases the resultant 'treasures' were tantamount to poorly recorded and/or performed detritus that had found its rightful place at the bottom of the airwaves. Of course not every offering is going to be like this, and there are I am sure many unjustly neglected masterpieces lying abandoned in garages and attics etc which I am grateful for the bloggers efforts in salvaging BUT:

1 - Is this desperate trawling of kitsch obscurities indicative of a dearth of new progressive music in general ?

2 - Is this indicative of an inverted snobbery where the most obscure and most incoherent is deemed best ?

3 - Is this indicative of a need to confer a value on items based solely on their (physical) scarcity  i.e not their contents ?

Let me know your thoughts (or not, and take up knitting instead, the choice is yours )

Visitor13 wrote: I think it's indicative of the vast majority of those items costing an arm and both legs on eBay.

Yep, granted there is a very lucrative niche market for some of the original vinyl, but given that the bloggers make these items available for free download from their sites, (sometimes in lossless compression formats complete with scanned artwork etc) would this not have a shrinking effect on their fiscal value ?


Edited by ExittheLemming - April 26 2009 at 08:14

Visitor13 wrote: I think it's indicative of the vast majority of those items costing an arm and both legs on eBay.

I agree on most of the cases   

  good thread-- yeah I've picked up a few of these excavated 'jewels' that didn't live up to the hype, like Ben (the original LP is inexplicably valuable), Trevor Rabin's Rabbit , and accidentally ordered a band called Fields thinking it was the heavyprog band listed here but - you guessed it - was a different group altogether