Baby blue pages
The Baby Blue Pages are a German progressive rock - Encyclopedia in the form of a website .
history
The idea for the project came from the German-language progressive rock mailing list [progrock-dt]. There a participant in the list asked for a list of bands that would give broad access to progressive rock. A collection of reviews developed from the list of suggested bands. Finally, in July 1999, it was decided to set up a comprehensive German-language progressive rock encyclopedia. For the seven-year anniversary there was a special in which the operators of the Babyblauen Seiten gave musicians whose music had been reviewed the opportunity to review music themselves. As Arjen Lucassen of Ayreon this took about Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd to write.
content
The main part of the website consists of reviews of albums from Progressive Rock, sub-genres such as Canterbury Sound , Rock in Opposition , Zeuhl , Art Rock , Neo-Prog , Retro-Prog , New Prog and Progressive Metal as well as from more or less related genres such as Psychedelic Rock , Spacerock , Krautrock and electronic music . There is also brief information on bands and performers in the genres. Further reviews deal with books on individual artists or bands and on the entire genre of progressive rock. The website is supplemented by introductory guides to certain areas of progressive rock, a glossary, FAQs and a list of links which also includes CD sources.
Another feature of the website is the so-called pathfinder Java applet , an interactive graphic representation of band relationships in the form of a network, with the help of which musical cooperation can be localized.
meaning
The baby blue pages offer "probably the most comprehensive overview of the topic" ( Julian von Heyl ). The Swiss progressive rock portal proggies.ch describes the Babyblauen Seiten as the "great reference work on the subject of Prog" ( proggies.ch ), elsewhere they are considered to be "probably the largest progressive rock review archive in Europe, perhaps even worldwide" ( laughingtear.de ).
The magazine Men's Health counted the Babyblauen Seiten in a report on the genre Progressive Rock in the 1/2007 issue of "the most important sites on the Internet" ( Kirsten Segler ). On January 25, 2009, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reported on the baby blue pages.
In the annual polls of Plattentests.de, the Babyblauen Seiten have been in the top 20 since 2004, including 8th place in 2005 with Pitchfork Media .
statistics
59 reviewers are currently working on the Baby Blue Pages, each of whom has written between 15 and 1,500 reviews. Each reviewer introduces himself on a personal page, which makes it easier to classify his reviews in the broad spectrum of the employees' musical tastes. In August 2016, the Babyblauen Seiten contained around 23,000 reviews on 15,000 albums by 6,000 bands.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Baby blue pages on progblog.de ( Memento from August 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Baby blue pages update! at de.groups.yahoo.com
- ↑ Seven years of baby blue pages on baby blue pages.de
- ↑ a b Jörg-Olaf Schäfers: Notebook: Back to Music ( Memento from February 4, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), cf. Baby blue pages in the FAS
- ↑ Baby Blue Pages - The German-language Prog-Encyclopedia on Woin.heute.de
- ↑ Links - - The Swiss Progressive Rock Portal. In: proggies.ch. Retrieved October 12, 2018 .
- ↑ Information and magazines about Progressive Rock at laughingtear.de
- ↑ What is Progressive Rock? on menshealth.de
- ^ Annual poll 2005 - The results (Part 2) on Plattentests.de
- ↑ For comparison: In March 2012 the Babyblauen pages contained 17,612 reviews on 11,976 albums by 4,479 bands.