Below you will find an evaluation of the DPRPoll 2007. If you want to go straight to the results tables, click here.

After the dip we had last year, the number of participants in the DPRPoll 2007 grew to 1045. As usual, most people came from The Netherlands (23.4%), the USA (16.7%), the UK (10.8%), Canada (5.3%) and Germany (4.5%).
Again we can welcome some people from far-off places, as the entrants from the 55 different countries include Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Syria and South Africa!

Age-wise we can draw a very comforting conclusion that the prog audience seems to be getting younger again. The average age of the poll participants dropped 0.02 years to 37.32. 42 participants were under 20 years old, with our youngest participant being 11 and our oldest 61.

As always we had a number of great prizes which we raffled among the entrants. DPRP would like to thank Dirk Jacob, Max Simms, Matthew Cohen, Frank van Liempd and Jon Vilbo for their generous donations. All prize winners have been contacted, but if you are curious, have a look here what the prizes and their winners were.

In total 633 different albums were voted for. Below you will find the Top 25.
We have provided links to the DPRP reviews of these albums.

Nr	Band	Album	Votes	Percentage	Weighted Points
1	Porcupine Tree	Fear Of A Blank Planet	657	62.87%	5064
2	Dream Theater	Systematic Chaos	420	40.19%	2716
3	The Flower Kings	The Sum Of No Evil	353	33.78%	2213
4	Blackfield	II	343	32.82%	2030
5	Riverside	Rapid Eye Movement	322	30.81%	1989
6	Rush	Snakes & Arrows	286	27.37%	1795
7	Neal Morse	Sola Scriptura	271	25.93%	1755
8	Gazpacho	Night	190	18.18%	1351
9	Phideaux	Doomsday Afternoon	191	18.28%	1224
10	Fish	13th Star	168	16.08%	1023
11	Pain Of Salvation	Scarsick	171	16.36%	956
12	Marillion	Somewhere Else	180	17.22%	953
13	Galahad	Empires Never Last	133	12.37%	811
14	Symphony X	Paradise Lost	138	13.21%	706
15	Threshold	Dead Reckoning	124	11.87%	677
16	Radiohead	In Rainbows	118	11.29%	667
17	Quidam	Alone Together	101	9.67%	645
18	Satellite	Into The Night	109	10.43%	596
19	Knight Area	Under A New Sign	106	10.14%	587
20	The Pineapple Thief	What We Have Sown	94	9.00%	570
21	Porcupine Tree	Nil Recurring	91	8.71%	549
22	Ritual	The Hemulic Voluntary Band	91	8.71%	529
23	Anekdoten	A Time Of Day	92	8.80%	522
24	Magic Pie	Circus Of Life	94	9.00%	502
25	Oceansize	Frames	82	7.85%	494

The number 1 shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone. Porcupine Tree's Fear Of A Blank Planet topped pretty much every decent music poll in the world, so it is only obvious to see them topping the DPRPoll as well (their second win, after 2005's Deadwing). In the DPRP review the album was called "a masterpiece that should be in every prog rock lover's collection, receiving a full 10 out of 10 rating.
What is more surprising is the huge lead of their win. Nearly two-thirds of all participants voted for this album, most of them rating the album highly which gave the album an average rating of 7.7 - the highest average we have ever had in a DPRPoll. This earned Porcupine Tree nearly twice the number of weighted points as Dream Theater on number two.

As became already evident early in the year, 2007 was a rather good year for prog releases, with almost every major band releasing an album. As can be expected this has resulted in quite a lot of heavyweight bands in the top 10: Dream Theater, The Flower Kings, Rush, Neal Morse... all to be expected. Much more surprisingly is the inclusion two relatively small and independent bands in the top 10, Gazpacho and Phideaux. Their inclusion is at the expense of some of the more established bands like Pain of Salvation, Marillion and Threshold - all of which had their previous album firmly in the top 10 of previous polls.

Another first is the diversity of record labels that are represented in the top 10 - the ten albums that make the top 10 have been released on 7 different labels. A big chance from previous years where at least half of the albums in the top 10 would be released on Inside Out.

Altogether this years top 10 is characterised by its diversity, with nearly every sub-genre in prog represented.

Click here for the entire list of results.

Once again not overly surprising. David Gilmour's Remember That Night received a DPRP Recommended review and justly so; A concert featuring many Floyd classics and interesting special guests, and a bonus disc filled to the brim with additional footage.

The rest of the top 5 contains a lot of firsts. Blackfield, The Tangent and Sigur Rós all released their first DVD in 2007, which garnered them a lot of credits.

The superior audio quality and bonus footage of the Fear Of A Blank Planet DVD-Audio caused Porcupine Tree's album to appear in the DVD top 10 as well.

In total 135 different DVDs were voted for.

Before we go to the list of best individual tracks, let's see which 5 bands got the most votes, regardless of which track.

Now let's look at which of the 533 individual tracks proved most popular.

As always epics rule the chart - not a song under 15 minutes in the top 5!

Like the albums poll, Porcupine Tree won by a landslide, nabbing a third of all votes, three times as many as the number 2!

For the rest the votes for best tracks are as equally divided as the votes for best album, with only Porcupine Tree and The Flower Kings appearing twice in the top 10 - again, quite a change from recent years.

A big congrats to Ed Unitsky on topping the artwork poll for the third time in five years! His surreal images have been a favourite for bands and fans alike, and his ludicrous Volkswagen goldfish for The Flower Kings' The Sum Of No Evil proved a masterstroke.

Lasse Hoile's disturbing images have become an integral part of Porcupine Tree's image these days, just like Mark Wilkinson's artwork has become synonymous with Fish' music. Dream Theater proves that you can never go wrong with Hugh Syme artwork (oddly enough Syme's artwork for Rush came sixth, despite his long history with that band) and newcomer Antonio Seijas rounds up the top 5.

In total 123 different albums got voted for in the 'Best Artwork' category.

The participants of the poll voted for 400 different concerts in 2007. To get a clear picture of which bands did best on the stage last year, we'll first have a look at the ones that got the most votes, regardless of which concert.

Now let's have a look at which of these 398 gigs got the most votes for Best Concert 2007.

The results of the best concert poll are always widespread, due to the sheer number of gigs played all over the globe. The high number of participants from The Netherlands, coupled relatively with the low number of gigs a band plays in this country usually results in Dutch gigs dominating the highest regions of this particular poll.
That said, Marillion played no less than 13 gigs in The Netherlands in 2007, which can't be considered a relatively low number, but nonetheless the closing night at the 2007 Convention Weekend got the most votes for best gig by a mile, preventing Porcupine Tree to win in every category of this year's poll.

Special mention must go to the inaugural Symforce Festival which ended up on a shared 5th position. However, if the votes for the individual performances at this festival would count towards the festival itself, it would probably have topped the poll.

Though The Reasoning does feature former members of Magenta and Karnataka, this is not a 'supergroup' collaboration like usually tops this poll. They are a genuine new band who deservedly won top votes for best newcomer. In fact, this is probably the first time in the history of the poll that four of the top 5 voted newcomers are in fact genuine newcomers.

In total 127 different bands were voted for as best newcomer.

Many different albums, gigs, incidents, etc received votes for 'biggest disappointment'. We grouped the votes until they referred to a unique album, gig or incident.
The other most often mentioned, and more specific, disappointments can be found below.

Another departure from the trend of recent years. Normally if an album is chosen as biggest disappointment, the same is album can usually also be found in the upper region of the best albums poll, thus proving that the 'biggest disappointment' should always be taken with a hefty pinch of salt.
Not quite the case this year with the latest albums by Marillion and Pain of Salvation in the top 5 disappointments, but outside the top 10 of the best albums poll.

Fortunately Dream Theater keeps the dubious honour of having all their albums of the past five years feature both in the top 5 best albums as well as the top 5 biggest disappointments.

Last year 53 people voted the lack of a 5-piece reunion of Genesis as the biggest disappointment of the year - this year 49 of them still haven't gotten over that fact and complained about it once again.

The departure of founding member Martin Orford from IQ has caused surprisingly few ripples in this years disappointment poll. Not to mention Threshold losing their leadsinger - this only upset six people in total.

As a balance to 'Biggest Disappointment' we added a new question this year, asking the participants what they thought was the best thing to happen to prog in 2007. The results are remarkable.

See? 49 people still had to problems accepting that Hackett and Gabriel were not participating in the Genesis reunion, twice the number of people voted for the reunion and its tour as the biggest happening of 2007.
It seems people generally regard concerts as the biggest musical happening in a year, as four of the top 5 results relate to concerts or tours.

A new section this year was that we asked people for what they thought was the best musical performance on a 2007 studio album. There are too many results to evaluate into detail here, so therefore we have only printed the top result for each of the five section in this page, and you can view the rest of the results in the database tables here.

In the annual poll DPRP gives its readers the opportunity to tell us what they think of the pages in general and how they rate the various sub-pages. We would like to thank the people who took the time to send us valuable feedback on our site, which helps us to improve it. Below you can see how people rated DPRP in 2007:

It looks like we had quite a number of newcomers to our site this year. Welcome! We hope you are here to stay.

>Let's have a look at how the people felt DPRP had changed in 2007:

We would like to thank the 350 people who felt the site has improved the last year. We intend to continue to grow with the number of reviews and interviews we do each year, as well as provide you with a weekly news update and Dutch gigguide. We're planning to do some major changes to the website in the near future - so watch this space!

Of the 11 people who felt the site got worse this past year most gave helpful tips on how to improve. (though one person blames the website getting worse on his own changing musical taste - not too sure how we can help with that :-) )

Click here if you wish to see the full results of the poll.

Click here if you also want to see the list of prizes and winners.

You can also check out what the DPRP Team voted for themselves.

For comments about the poll, please e-mail The DPRP Team.