If a buyer cannot be found and these titles cease publication it will be devastating blow not just for music writing but also for those genres of music ill-served by the rest of the British music press. It was host to many talented writers passionate about the sorts of music the mainstream media tended to dismiss as unfashionable and irrelevant.

You’d never catch any of their writers filing a Pseud’s Corner style piece about production line pop extruded for twelve-year-olds. Let’s hope they all land on their feet.

I hope something of Team Rock survives. For many of those bands who appear regularly on this blog, Prog Magazine in particular was the only national high street print publication that was ever likely to feature them. Yes, there are limited-circulation subscription-only magazines and many specialist bloggers, but nobody else has a fraction of Prog’s reach. I know I’ve been critical of Prog in the past, and questioned whether having one and only one powerful gatekeeper was healthy for the scene in the long term, but their loss will still leave a huge hole, and the bands will inevitably suffer from the loss of the exposure they brought.

Because your life didn’t stop in 1993 when you got a job or got married and stopped going to gigs. And your taste in music doesn’t have to be frozen there either. There’s plenty of great music – but if you’re looking at the charts, you’re looking in the wrong place. The good stuff is hard to find. It’s not going to ‘break through’, take over the mainstream or spearhead a new movement. It’s probably not the music your kids listen to.

People forget that back in the 1970s, the supposed heyday of classic rock, you’d never hear Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd on daytime radio or on television; it was all Boney M, Gary Glitter or worse. The best stuff was only ever broadcast late at night, or spread by word or mouth.

Today there is more great music out there than it’s possible to keep up with. Regular readers of this blog will know I champion the likes of Mostly Autumn, Panic Room, Chantel McGregor, Touchstone, Also Eden, Cloud Atlas, Morpheus Rising and many more. The media-driven “mainstream” pays them no attention. Most of your neighbours and work colleagues have no idea their music exists. If you’re not a regular reader and have stumbled across this post at random there’s a good chance you won’t have heard of them either, in which case you ought to give them a listen.

Of course, there is probably an awful lot of great music that I have yet to hear.

In the editorial of Classic Rock Magazine, Scott Rowley asks “Is Rock Dying”

“Rock’n'roll has died,” former Buckcherry bassist Jimmy Ashhurst Facebooked recently, “and nobody’s really that pissed because we caught it in a box and can look at it whenever we want.” Ginger Wildheart posted similar sentiments days after the Sonisphere headliners were announced. “It would appear that rock music is finally on the machine that goes bing,” he wrote. “The revolving door of (fewer than 10) worthy festival headliners indicates, to me anyway, that we have outlived the era of ‘big rock’.”

The cracks aren’t just beginning to show, they’re as wide and deep as the lines on Keith Richards’ face. The legends are getting older and, let’s face it, dying. In a decade’s time, can we reasonably expect to see tours from Bob Dylan (aged 72), the Rolling Stones (oldest member: 72), Motörhead (Lemmy is 68), Lynyrd Skynyrd (Gary Rossington: 62) or ZZ Top (Billy Gibbons: 64)? Who will fill the country’s stadiums, headline our festivals and fill our arenas then?

One problem is that many classic rock fans are just too conservative, expecting pastiches of their old heroes rather than giving bands with a newer sound a chance. Another is a “mainstream” pushing too much watered-down mediocrity and calling it “rock”. And the rock/indie tribal divide has a lot to answer for as well. How many of the people complaining that rock is dying also insist that Muse are not a rock band?

If rock is to have a future, it won’t sound like copy of its past. I’m sure that there’s a place for exciting new rock bands who have ambitions of being more than glorified Thin Lizzy tribute acts. When I hear young bands such as Haken, I’m sure rock does have such a future.

Whether any of these bands will be part of the mainstream in the same way Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were in the 1970s remains an open question. Artists like Steven Wilson, Opeth and Nightwish can fill venues like The Royal Albert Hall or Brixton Academy, but their music is probably too dense and sophisticated for the average daytime radio listener. Do they not represent the real present and future of rock, free from having to confirm to mainstream fashion?

In the end, if ambitious and creative bands can find a big enough audience for them to continue making music on the scale that they want to make it, does it actually matter whether it’s on the mainstream radar or not?