Is Progressive Music Dying? Google Trends weighs in.

One thing that people might not know about Thomas and me is that we’re both data nerds. I have a graduate degree in experimental psychology and Thomas is a data analyst who almost has a graduate degree in public policy.

Since we’ve both undertaken to start a prog website in 2016, an obvious consideration would be the question of whether prog is, in fact, a booming and lucrative area of interest for people. To explore one angle of this question, I decided to use Google Trends to explore the relative interest in progressive metal and progressive rock over time.

The results are kind of a drag. See for yourself.

The chart is scaled such that the point of highest interest is placed at 100. Then, the other data points are scaled relative to the peak of interest.

This shows the last 12 years of Google web searches for the topic “Progressive Rock” (in all languages) and “Progressive Metal.” It’s scaled such that the highest point is set at 100, and number of web searches are measured relatively to the highest point.

As you can see, it seems that interest in Progressive Rock is 1/3 of what it was back in 2004. It’s been in steady decline since then.

You can also see that (contrary to my own expectations) Progressive Metal is far less popular than Progressive Rock, even with very popular bands such as Dream Theater and Pain of Salvation out there.

So it looks as though interest in prog was highest in the mid ’00s and has declined since then.

But what’s even more interesting to me is the distribution of prog fans around the world by year. You can see the trends across the world – who is searching for progressive rock the most? Once again, the dark blue areas represent relative interest as compared to other countries (not absolute interest).

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I took screenshots of interesting years. At the beginning, for some reason the United States and France are the most interested in “Progressive Rock,” but that expands considerably in 2009, when large swaths of Northern Europe are into prog as well as Turkey, Brazil, and Japan. For some reason, Russia experienced an upsurge of interest in 2011 as well as India, but by the present day (2015), there are no longer countries with a heavy interest in prog (this reflects a more even distribution across countries).

What can we take from this?

It may be that prog is not so popular these days compared to a decade ago. Additionally, the distribution of interest in prog seems to be concentrated in a few places: the U.S., Europe, and Japan, with an additional healthy showing in the BRIC countries (with the exception of China).

So what would have been the best time to start the Proglodytes blog? I’m guessing sometime around 2004.

Out of curiosity, I also looked up the relative popularity of hot dogs over the last 12 years. Let’s just say hot dogs are way more popular than progressive rock, and increasing in popularity. Therefore, based on the data, we have decided to re-brand our website to include not only news, reviews, and interviews of prog musicians, we will also feature hot dogs.

So do you think this is evidence that prog is a dying art form? Or do you think there are flaws in the a priori assumptions of my methodology? Let us know in the comments!

If you want to look at or play around with the data, you can find it at THIS LINK on Google Trends. Data analysis brought to you by Proglodytes – the hot dog prog blog.