To the people who think Enslaved is not a good candidate because the festival should largely appease those who listen to bands like Seventh Wonder, etc.
Glenn should not care about you. Now, before I too get banned too for saying that, I'm not saying that you guys don't matter -- you guys buy tickets after all. However, the vast majority of these bands do not sell many records (some may not even have official releases in the States) or could not bring in enough people. Enslaved however does sell records, and does bring in fans. Thus, a hard medium between appeasing you guys (as well as himself of course) and trying to make the festival a financial success is a hard one to reach, but it must be met.
The facts are these: when people got mad over the announcement of this year's line up not having enough Seventh Wonder-ish bands and too many screaming bands/bands that they don't like, Glenn made it abundantly clear that a nice chunk of the longtime fans of the festival had stopped attending over the last few years -- and even had the ticket audits to show for it.
It isn't to say that none of these sorts of bands bands should play ProgPower, because alot of these bands helped define the festival (and not only that, but some of them went on to establish careers because of the festivals that helped bolster the festival alongside it), but something's got to give now. None of these bands that you guys pine for are relevant in the scene. They don't sell records or draw crowds (some of these bands probably don't even play more than 10 shows a year), and nobody beyond this forum really talks about them, etc. Music evolves and changes, and you have to deal with that. Wanting the same sort of bands to fill up a festival over and over again over a 12 year spectrum is not going to yield a successful festival. Enslaved may not appeal to everyone on this board, but they draw enough people that they could headline the festival and bring in a new crowd which would create new returnees. Diversity is the spice of life, as they say, and the most successful fesitvals these days are the ones that are diverse enough to bring in multiple people. Maryland Death Fest went from being much smaller than ProgPower to selling over 3,000 tickets within one year, because the promoters decided to seriously diversity their festival and bring in more relevant bands instead of the same old foreign grind bands that don't have much of a following here to begin with.
I want to see the fruits of a cross-pollination between "metal bands" (Enslaved) and "bands that play metal-like music" (Isis). Bands that have arrived at similar points by navigating rather different paths with different influences and different fanbases. I want to see what happens to a band like Russian Circles when they integrate black metal tremolo riffing and true grimness into their sound.
