A Year Behind

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Time schedule

That’s right, folks! ProgSphere is celebrating its first anniversary since we’ve been formed in April 2010. Although officially we moved to this domain in June. ProgSphere was brought as an idea of reviewing / interviewing progressive rock (and its relatives) albums and bands from all around the world. Over the last year we’ve brought forth tons of interviews and reviews, plus a growing collection of special articles, as well as 5 Progstravaganza compilations, which will be discussed a bit more below.

Our very first interview was with Mr. Andy Tillison of The Tangent and Parallel or 90 Degrees fame, which really helped us break into the whole thing. At the time, being hosted on a blogspot.com thingie, we were mostly focused on doing interviews, thus we made a several of them in a row with musicians such Nad Sylvan, Guy Manning, Pahl Sundstrom & Mikal Styrke, Dan Britton, Alejandro Jarrin, Roye Albrighton, Alan Morse, Lalle Larsson, Rikard Sjoblom, Martin Hornveth, Nicklas Barker, Hans Lundin. It took some time until we changed our location to prog-sphere.com in June and hopefully made this all a bit more serious.

With this shift, we also started to pay more attention to actual releases, thus logically we started to review albums, EP, singles, whatnot, and in that way bring our activities to the next level. As our initial mission always was and still is introducing people to new bands, all the way from Norway to Peru (har har!) and further, in August we began to publish a series of compilations we now know as ProgSphere’s Progstravaganza Compilation(s) of Awesomeness. And so far, we’ve released 5 of them. Through these 5 pieces, we managed to show the eclecticism of prog by covering many genres ranging from straight progressive rock, psychedelia, stoner rock, space rock to jazz fusion and much more, presenting in that way around 70 bands.

Next up was adding a column as a new feature on the website, and we’ve got in touch with Tymon Kruidenier (Exivious, ex-Cynic), Ron Jarzombek and Paul Masvidal (Cynic, Aeon Spoke, ex-Death). While the latter two have agreed to write for Prog Sphere from time to time, Tymon has already completed two columns where he speaks about his upcoming projects as well as giving a much more detailed preview of how next Exivious album will look/sound like.

Last but not least, with our ever-growing list of activities, Prog Sphere is happy to say (formally) that we are becoming an independent label with the intent to release music. Although so far we’ve only put out digital releases, Consecration & Temple of the Smoke Big Band‘s Consecration in the Temple of the Smoke EP and Exist‘s In Mirrors EP, we are looking forward to a real physical release from Prog Sphere Records and hopefully it will happen later this year.

Besides these all, there are possible plans to organize a festival under Prog Sphere’s “sponsorship”, but this couldn’t happen for a long time. And until then, who knows, maybe we will come up with something more, it’s certain that our metal spheres are rolling with thought.

Numbers talking

At ProgSphere website we have some pretty well organized statistics, which give us a good insight into the website’s visits, top posts, monthly visits, etc. In these 9 months, since we changed to new server, we’ve had over 50,000 visits, which I suppose isn’t that much, but still it means a lot when you know that your hard work is being seen by some people.

With around 250 posts, divided in 7 categories, with 10 active collaborators, ProgSphere is set to become an important voice in progressive music.

Let the numbers do the talking. Our busiest day was April 4th, 2011 with 1,084 clicks. April 2011 is the highest ranked month with more than 8,000 visits. The first three months of 2011 had 14,825 clicks, which seems pretty good if we compare it with the 22,810 clicks we had in our first seven months (from June till December 2010).

All in all, the year behind us has brought a lot of satisfaction, we met with many new bands and musicians and also presented many new young bands to a wide auditorium. From that reasons, we may say that our mission is more than accomplished. Not that we’re done!

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