On March 25th 2012, I decided I would try creating a Facebook page. I had been posted music related stuff on my personal page but no one really cared (other than my amazing wife). So why not throw all of that onto a separate page? That way I am not annoying anyone and I just have a private place.

I called it “Progressive Music Page” because I had no better ideas. I even included a parenthetical of Progressive Rock/Progressive Metal so that it wouldn’t get lost. Then again, I assumed maybe 10 people would like the page. For a while that’s all there was.

The first change was that I did this A-Z exercise where I posted a band a day based on the name. I decided to tag the band, mostly because I had just learned how to do it. And that was when people started liking posts and even liking the page. I recall going over 100 and thinking how crazy that was. Other people liked the same weird ass music. Nice.

I came up with a logo for the page and things were fine. From 2012 to 2015, the growth was steady but certainly nothing to take seriously. But the page changed into a planet. I had been asked by my buddy Jon DuBose to contribute music ideas for his radio show “Headphone Meditations.” It was fun and I always wanted to be a DJ since I was a kid. So this was close. I was asked by Metal World Radio station owner Melissa “DJ Hawk” Montano if I wanted my own radio show. Hell yes! This made me rethink the name since calling a radio “Progressive Music PAGE” made no sense at all! Enter the Warden.

My wife is amazing and she said to me “why not change the last word from ‘page’ to ‘planet’?” She knew I loved astronomy and space and it was the same first letter. PERFECT! And thus the planet was born. That led me to create the logo using a Roger Dean font I found and I felt like a read site versus whatever it was before this. The radio show had many fun moments and is still going strong to this day.

In 2016, things got crazy. To this day I still don’t know how it happened. I have never advertised on Facebook or anywhere. My Instagram page at the time was called “progmanrob” since I adapted that alias for myself (I’ve dumped the Progman part since then). I had to change the Instagram page over to be Progressive Music Planet because my follows were getting crazy and had more to do with music than my cats. So I created a personal one and let PMP have the initial one. On Facebook, the likes went thru the fucking roof. Thousands at a time were coming in. It never slowed down either. Apparently FB was including me more and more with “Pages you might like” for free. How nice. It was truly mindblowing.

Of course since I’ve been a shy, unsocial person all my life, being surrounded by tens of thousands of people caused issues. To this day I still act like a fucking asshole from time to time. I’ve had to apologize many times for saying something stupid or getting into an argument. I still get really pissed off with the “that’s not prog” comments or when people piss all over an album that I love. It’s fine to have an opinion but people get nasty and then I have to ban them. I’ve learned not to argue as much and just ban jerks FIRST. But I’ve never been in a position like this and eventhough it’s been years now. I am learning.

I started this website because I’d been doing music reviews for another website PowerofMetal.dk and had a good following there. Why write for someone else? So…I started this and did reviews. The problem was, I never liked doing them! I was an English major in college so I can write. But how many ways can you say you like an album or don’t like an album?? Eventually it started to ruin my enjoyment of listening to music. I wasn’t listening, I was thinking about what about the song I liked or didn’t. Plus I got SLAMMED with review requests. I had to remove my email from this site. It was nuts. I still get a lot of requests via Facebook and had to create an auto reply for them. I have basically stopped doing reviews and because I stopped, so did the folks who were contributors to this website. I do appreciate their work!

The page has always been a one man show. Along with Instagram and 95% of this site. Why don’t I share? I wanted this to be my vision of music I like and that I think others will like. The mission statement is to share music that maybe people know and like and thus can share with others OR maybe it’s something they haven’t heard before but will like. That’s it. “Check this out.” That’s all it is. I used to frequent a prog record store back in the 90s and that’s what the owner would say to me when I came in. “Hey Rob, check this out!” So that’s all I am saying to all of you. “Hey folks, check this out!”

Thank you for being a part of my life for 10 years or whenever you arrived at the Planet. It doesn’t matter when just as long as you did.

Rob