Allmusic (previously
All Music
Guide,
AMG)is a service of
music
guide, owned by
All Media
Guide. Allmusic was founded in 1991, by popular-culture
archivist
Michael Erlewine as a
guide for consumers. Its first reference book was published the
following year. AMG on the Internet predates the
World Wide Web and was first available as a
Gopher site.
Content
Allmusic content is created by professional data entry staff,
editors, and writers. The network of writers includes over 900
music critics who review albums and
songs and write artist biographies. Reviewers include Jason Ankeny,
Roxanne Blanford, Marisa Brown,
John Bush,
Al Campbell,
Eugene Chadbourne, Matt Collar, Ken
Dryden,
Stephen Thomas
Erlewine, Katherine Fulton, Jo-Anne Greene, David Jeffries,
Thom Jurek, Andy Kellman, the late
Cub
Koda, Andrew Leahey, Steve Leggett, Jason Lymangrover, Scott
McClintock, Greg McIntosh, Opal Louis Nations, Heather Phares, Greg
Prato,
Ned Raggett, Margaret Reges,
Eduardo Rivadavia, John Phillip Roberts, William Ruhlmann, Tim
Sendra, Rob Theakston,
Richie
Unterberger, Sean Westergaard, and
Scott
Yanow.
Allmusic's database is licensed and used in point-of-sale systems
by some music retailers. The database consists of:
- Basic data: names, genres, credits, copyright
info, product numbers, etc.
- Descriptive content: styles, tones, moods,
themes, nationalities, etc.
- Relational content: similar artists and
albums, influences, etc.
- Editorial content: biographies, reviews,
rankings, etc.
Allmusic also claims to have the world's largest digital archive of
music, including approximately six million songs fully digitized,
as well as the world's largest cover art library, with over half a
million cover image scans.
The website
allmusic.com is a sample of what is available in the
database. The site was launched in 1995 as an online demonstration
for potential database licensees of the breadth of content included
in the database.
The Allmusic database is also used by several generations of
Windows Media Player and
Musicmatch Jukebox to identify
and organize music collections. Windows Media Player 11 and the
integrated
MTV Urge music store have expanded
the use of Allmusic data to include related artists, biographies,
reviews, playlists and other data.
Allmusic is also used to provide data including catalog data,
artist biographies, album
reviews, related
artist information, playlists and other information in the
iTunes Music Store,
Zune
Marketplace,
eMusic,
AOL,
Yahoo!,
Amazon.com, and other music stores. Allmusic is
also at the heart of the
Naim Extended Music
database used by the Naim HDX hard disk player.
While the web version of AMG has much more information on most
forms of popular music than the 1176 pages of the 1992 book edited
by Michael Erlewine and Scott Bultman (
All Music Guide: the
best CDs, albums & tapes, published by
Miller Freeman Inc., San Francisco), it is
missing much of the information on classical music that appeared in
the book.
AMG
headquarters are located in Ann Arbor
, Michigan
, United States
.
History
Allmusic was founded as "All Music Guide" in 1991, by
popular-culture archivist
Michael
Erlewine, as a guide for consumers. Its first reference book,
All Music Guide: the best CDs, albums & tapes (with
1176 pages) was published in 1992.
AMG LASSO
The Allmusic database was made available in 2004 as part of the
AMG LASSO comprehensive media recognition
service. The LASSO media recognition service automatically
recognizes CDs, digital audio files, and DVDs. After the media is
recognized, the service delivers related content from
All Media Guide databases.
See also
References
- "Allmusic", Allmusic.com, 2009, webpage: allmus-about.
External links
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