Online AMG is going to start charging

[Alexander Hawkins]

I will not pay for the privilege of reading Thom Jurek's record reviews. Sorry.

Privilege?

[Brandon Burke]

Interesting. Hadn't heard about this one yet. I'll email Chris and ask him what's up.....

Edited September 24, 2003 by Brandon Burke

[Shrdlu]

Sad to hear, but I guess there's no free lunch.

If they are going to charge, then they're going to have to correct a lot of errors, and also actually react to the feedback (which, theoretically, allows any user to send in corrections). Otherwise, I wouldn't pay much for access. While it's been totally free, we really have not had much of a right to complain about the huge amount of errors and nonsensical reviews and ratings.

[Claude]

The reworking of AMG is underway. Discographies are now reversed (newest albums first)

[vibes]

The reworking of AMG is underway. Discographies are now reversed (newest albums first)

I noticed this too. I don't like it.

[Peter Johnson]

Sucks. Hysterical that we all keyed in on this. I was checking out Mogie the other day to see whether they listed Sonic Boom with the reissue date or the recording date, and also to see if they updated it to include the Procrastinator session. COULDN'T FIND IT! Finally searched by album name and found it that way. But the reverse-chron listings sure threw me for a loop!

Goes to show how easy it is to fall into habits!

[Simon Weil]

You know, it's often struck me that there's enough knowledge on these online discussion forums (here and elsewhere), that if some bright spark could come up with a way of ordering it and storing it, you could come up with a resource that would knock the spots of AMG (and everything else).

A reliable public online no-pay Jazz resource that would always be available would be something else. If it came to it, you could probably make it user-friendly, draw newbies into Jazz - as well as have specialist areas (and hyper-specialist areas.) etc., etc. Organise it communally. For the love of it. Why not?

No problem at all.

Simon Weil

[Michael Fitzgerald]

If you are talking about jazz discography, I've been doing this in my own little way for about 8 years: simply collecting and sharing information online via the WWW. Recently I helped establish a new domain to make it even better and more reliable for users (see URL below). There are others who are doing similar things and about 30 artists are covered at this one collaborative website. While it's not the "global domination" you have come to expect from the dreaded allmusic site, the accuracy on what it does cover is far better.

If anyone here is interested in contributing, please do. The software needed to do the job is available online and it's free. I'd love to see more people getting serious and adding to the wealth of information.

Generally, I would recommend this Lee Morgan site over whatever is in allmusic:

http://www.fsinet.or.jp/~lee/lee/leemorgn.htm

(And there are other excellent resources out there. Of course, there are some incomplete unreliable sites, too.)

On the other hand, if you are talking about the reviews and stars and "similar artists" listings and whatnot that the allmusic site does, that doesn't interest me.

Mike

[Shrdlu]

Great ideas, Simon and Mike, and, of course, your discographies have been very helpful for several years now, Mike.

The AMG guide has been very useful for me, though, and you can usually spot the errors. I have referred to it so many times that I have lost count. When you consider that it's all been free until now, I think it would be unfair not to be grateful for its help. A lot of the info there is quite accurate, too. Its main value to me has been just the lists of all the albums by the various musicians.

I have also liked the inclusion, in most cases, of the cover art from the LPs and CDs.

By the way, this is an ex research pure mathematician speaking, one who is very much accustomed to detailed research.

[Simon Weil]

The specific thing I was thinking about was all those old rec.music.bluenote posts, Mike. That is a fabulous archive of all sorts of things. But it isn't ordered in any way. In particular, there is an awful lot of valuable critical discussion of artists and records, which if edited, could provide as good a source of advice as, really, anywhere. I'd, personally, love to have a go at the editing chores.

You could use that, maybe, as a core online resource of opinion about records/artists and then invite people to build on it. If you were going to go that sort of route, you would have to have some sort of contribution system, where people would provide their own reviews, specifically, to the site. And you need editors.

But, evidently, that's only one area. If you had other interrelated areas (either onsite - or linked to sister websites) with discographical material, or with song titles, or whatever else one could come up with - that would deepen the value of the thing considerably- and indeed might be considered essential. It would also be nice if one could have some sort of powerful search engine.

Also, like I say, I have a particular interest in making such a site user friendly, so that newbies are drawn in. I don't think Jazz tries hard enough in this particular area. Obviously it is somewhat removed from what most of us want to get out of a website, but still, that's something that's on my mind.

Some thoughts...

Simon Weil

[Edit But basically the thing would just depend on who was enthused to do it. My underlying thought is that there is all this knowledge and information floating around in the online Jazz community and wouldn't it be cool to build a nice structure into which people can put it and from which people can draw. I don't, really, have any hard and fast ideas about structure etc. Just a sense that there's all this material out there and wouldn't it be nice to order it. So then, if AMG etc. goes belly-up, so what?]

[Edit 2 Mike is speaking from an already tried and tested and years in the making quality resource. But most people don't come to an online Jazz site to look for plain discographical material. It's part of what they want.]

Edited October 12, 2003 by Simon Weil