The All Music Guide (AMG) is a globally comprehensive metadata database about music owned by All Media Guide. AMG was founded in 1991 as a guide for consumers and published its first reference book the next year. 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.
AMG content is created by professional data entry staff, editors, and writers. The writer network includes over nine hundred music experts who review albums and songs, and write artist biographies. Reviewers include 'Blue' Gene Tyranny and Stephen Thomas Erlewine.
All Music Guide also has 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. 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.
All Music Guide data is also used by the Windows Media Player and Musicmatch Jukebox to identify and organize music collections.
All Music Guide is part of All Media Guide.
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 DVD's. After the media is recognized, the service delivers related metadata content from AMG metadata databases.
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