The All Music Guide (AMG) is a large, comprehensive and high quality metadata database about music. AMG was founded in 1991 as a guide for consumers and published its first reference book the next year. Considered to be the de-facto standard of music metadata, AMG's database is licensed and used in tens of thousands of 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.
All Music Guide also has the world's largest digital archive of music, including over 5.5 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. It is used extensively by music labels, DJs, rights holders, researchers, and other music industry members, as well as general music fans. The site was launched in 1995 as an online demonstration for potential database licensees of the breadth of content included in the database.
Allmusic for Windows Clicking on some deep links into allmusic.com tonight turned up this- Notice: You are accessing allmusic.com with a browser that is not currently supported.
AllMusic has always had a bad design (those GIFs from 1996 were hot!), but it used to be fine because the content shone through.
The allmusic content is great -- it's one of the few reference sites I look at on an almost daily basis -- but this craptastic design (which, as waxy notes, is even craptasticker than the last) just makes it harder to get at.