All Music Guide
From Free net encyclopedia
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 Vladimir Bogdanov, who holds a Ph.D in Mathematics, as a guide for consumers and published its first reference book the next year. The All-Music Guide predates the World wide web, and was first available as a Gopher Site. AMG's database is licensed and used in point-of-sale systems in record shops and in most online shops that sell music. The database consists of:
- Basic Metadata: names, genres, credits, copyright info, product numbers, etc.
- Descriptive Content: tones, moods, etc.
- Relational Content: similar artists and albums, influences, etc.
- Editorial Content: biographies, reviews, rankings, etc.
AMG content is created by professional data entry staff, editors, and writers. The writer network includes over nine hundred music critics who review albums and songs, and write artist biographies. Reviewers include 'Blue' Gene Tyranny, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, and Ned Raggett.
All Music Guide 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 organise music collections. Windows Media Player 10 still takes song information from AMG but, unlike earlier versions, it no longer supports the viewing of biographies and reviews.
The All Music Guide is also used to provide album reviews on the iTunes music store.
AMG headquarters are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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.