All Music Guide

[edit] Americola's celebrity biographies are provided by AmericolaWiki, a celebrity wiki. You can help contribute to Americola and edit this article.

The All Music Guide (AMG) is a metadata database about music owned by All Media Guide. AMG 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.

Contents 1 Content 2 AMG LASSO 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Content

AMG 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, William Ruhlmann, Richie Unterberger, Opal Louis Nations, John Storm Roberts, Eugene Chadbourne, Jo-Anne Greene, John Bush, Jason Ankeny, Thom Jurek, Andy Kellman, and Greg Prato^[1].

AMG'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.

AMG 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 allmusic.com website 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 All Music Guide 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 AMG data to include related artists, biographies, reviews, playlists and other metadata.

The All Music Guide 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, eMusic, AOL, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and other music stores.

AMG headquarters are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

AMG has received some criticism from users for its limited 5-star reviews. According to one music blogger^{[attribution needed]}, "AMG liberally hands out safe five star reviews to old classic albums, but I have yet to see one album in the past two years to have received a five-star."

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. One could look up a composer in the book and identify specific recordings recommended by AMG reviewers, but the website only provides a list of recordings.

AMG LASSO

The All Music Guide 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 AMG metadata databases.

See also

• List of online music databases
• All Music Guide to the Blues
• All Music Guide to Jazz

References

Wikipedia information about All Music Guide This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "All Music Guide". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.