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Is allmusic.com working?


Milestones

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I use to go to allmusic.com all the time.  It was not so great for samples, but there were some nice reviews--and of course credits.

It seems that I can't even go directly into it anymore.  Sometimes I find a link in, and something will come up--but it's really just empty: no overview, no credits, no track list.  

What happened here?  This is the only website that I regularly go to that is giving me trouble.  

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Per Chrome: 

To use Chrome on Mac, you need macOS Catalina 10.15 and up.

So maybe make sure that everything is up-to-date? OS as well as Chome.

I'm still using Firefox, but that's because I'm lazy and it still works well enough for me. And I let it update itself anytime it needs to.

I also have Chrome installed and it seems to work just fine, maybe even better than Firefox, but like I said, I'm lazy. If it ain't broke... 

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35 minutes ago, Stompin at the Savoy said:

Chrome worked for me on Win 10 but not very well.  Need to set up something to stop the innumerable popups,,,

Plenty of help for you to do that out on the internet.

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I contributed as a free lancer to Allmusic.com for fourteen years, but the last few years were pretty sad. It didn't help that the last of us freelancers were dropped near the end of 2012. It seemed like they ignored jazz for the most part after that time, other than the best known artists. I rarely visit the site any more.

Edited by Ken Dryden
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The site itself, the software, has gone downhill a lot over the years.  It's buggy now and the popups and popup videos are really excessive.  If you try to block their popups with popup blockers and script blockers they get all huffy and send you to a dead end.  I still view it with Firefox but often where I would have gone to allmusic I now go to Discogs and Musicbrainz...

As far as the content, yep it's also going downhill.  They don't seem to maintain anything and nothing is ever corrected.

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I agree about the deficiencies in the website but never had an issue reaching it ... I do go there when I find potential musical targets on discogs especially if our own Ken Dryden provided the review (Yanow is trustworthy in this regard too).

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14 hours ago, Stompin at the Savoy said:

The site itself, the software, has gone downhill a lot over the years.  It's buggy now and the popups and popup videos are really excessive.  If you try to block their popups with popup blockers and script blockers they get all huffy and send you to a dead end.

 

I pay the $12/year for the ad/popup free version.  I use the site a lot (as well as using Discogs a lot), so it's worth the 3 cents a day to me.

Edited by felser
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Allmusic is tolerable with the block popups option turned on in Firefox.  It's still a busy, annoying interface which is not well set up for people with visual impairment and I seldom go there anymore.  Ken Dryden's reviews are good along with Yanow and a few others.  For the factual info, credits, players, dates, etc it's typically inferior to Discogs, Wikipedia, and Musicbrainz.   I do contribute to Wikipedia but I can't see myself paying for Allmusic.

Edited by Stompin at the Savoy
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My adblocker suppresses almost all of the popups.

I often visit allmusic for reviews and to research credits. Sometimes to sleuth BFT tunes. 😉

Seems like the site got redesigned a couple of (few?) months ago. For a while it was wonky and I stayed away. Seems to work OK now.

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One of the things that drove me crazy was the amount of incorrect data entered, probably by minimum wage workers at the home office who knew nothing about the music. Writers didn't submit the song lists, composers, musician credits, etc., unless there was a release not in the database that was approved for us to review. I tried to look over them before submitting reviews. When Scott Yanow was editor, he tried to purge as many errors in jazz entries that he could find time to do, but it seemed like a low priority for the powers that were in charge. The fourth and final edition of the All Music Guide to Jazz was a disaster, with many of the errors Scott had corrected reappearing in the book, while the excessive, frequently over the top reviews by Thom Jurek that helped make that volume forgettable. Read his ridiculous review of Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert, one of his most amateurish reviews .

Another time I had an artist contact me and ask why my glowing review of his CD was only given 3.5 stars, which wasn't the rating I had assigned. I contacted the editor and was told I gave too many 4 and 4.5 star reviews. My response was I didn't enjoy wasting my time pitching reviews of mediocre and terrible releases, due to the high volume of worthy new releases, plus the back catalog I was pitching. They also had a policy of not allowing 5 stars unless it was a landmark release that had stood the test of time. Once in a while, there is a release that merits five stars.

I've lost count of the number of times it has been sold but anyone I was in contact from at Allmusic.com has long since left.

At least none of the checks had issues clearing....the money was good for a time until they cut back the assignments to a handful each week.

 

 

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On 2/11/2024 at 11:24 AM, felser said:

I pay the $12/year for the ad/popup free version.  I use the site a lot (as well as using Discogs a lot), so it's worth the 3 cents a day to me.

Same for me, too. I still use it a lot (even with all it's flaws), so it's worth it in order to avoid the ads.

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