All Music Guide

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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 also 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: 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 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! and other music stores.

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.

External links

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