AllMusic
 | |
| Available in | English |
|---|---|
| Owner | Macrovision |
| Created by | Michael Erlewine and Vladimir Bogdanov |
| URL | http://www.allmusic.com |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | No |
Allmusic (previously the All Music Guide) is a metadata database about music, owned by All Media Guide. Allmusic was founded in 1991 by popular-culture archivist Michael Erlewine and mathematician Vladimir Bogdanov, Ph.D., as a guide for consumers. Its first reference book was published the next year. AMG 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 Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Marisa Brown, John Bush, Al Campbell, Matt Collar, David Jeffries, Katherine Fulton, Thom Jurek, Andy Kellman, Jason Lymangrover, Andrew Leahey, Steve Leggett, Scott McClintock, Greg McIntosh, Heather Phares, Tim Sendra, Sean Westergaard, Ned Raggett, William Ruhlmann, Richie Unterberger, Opal Louis Nations, John Phillip Roberts, Eugene Chadbourne, Jo-Anne Greene, Scott Yanow, Margaret Reges, Eduardo Rivadavia, Jason Ankeny, Ken Dryden, Roxanne Blanford, and Greg Prato. [1] [2]
Allmusic's database is licensed and used in point-of-sale systems by some music retailers. The database consists of:
- Basic Metadata: 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 metadata.
Allmusic is also used to provide metadata 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.
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.
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 metadata content from All Media Guide metadata databases.
References
- ^ "Greg Prato". Retrieved 2007-03-29.
- ^ "AMG Editors". Retrieved 2008-03-19.
See also
- All Music Guide to the Blues
- All Music Guide to Jazz
- List of online encyclopedias
- List of online music databases