For two decades now, AllMusic.com (formerly the All Music Guide) has been the most comprehensive music database on the Internet, providing extensive biographies, discographies, reviews, catalog information, recommendations of similar artists—even indications of a musician’s overall mood, from “Cerebral” to “Boisterous”—all free to fans and, most importantly, digital music services like iTunes and Pandora. But like all successful websites that are just fine the way they are, a change is gonna come: Billboard reports that AllMusic.com will soon be folded into newly launched all-around entertainment site AllRovi.com, which plans to incorporate AllMusic into a “one-stop shop for all things entertainment” alongside similar databases for film and television.
Naturally it’s caused some hand-wringing among people who fear that this, coupled with AllMusic’s recent decline in production of new reviews, suggests that the future means less comprehensive music writing for the site. However, AllRovi VP of marketing Dave Jordan promises that all of the current features will continue, but will simply be added onto with new features like a recommendation tool that lets users search for music by time period, genre, or mood, while also adding new blog posts and recommended playlists with themes like “exercise” and “dinner party.” So we’ll see… We’ll see. In the meantime, you may want to begin backing up your favorite AllMusic reviews just in case, such as this one for Billy Joel’s Attila album.