Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/All Media Network


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Per the uncontested sources provided. I see there is a merger discussion underway and quality concerns can be raised on talk or directly addressed by editing the article Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:51, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

All Media Network

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Ridiculous blatant promotion. nothing significant about it. Light2021 (talk) 20:32, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Business-related deletion discussions.  Jupitus Smart  09:00, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Websites-related deletion discussions.  Jupitus Smart  09:00, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions.  Jupitus Smart  09:00, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 03:03, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 03:03, 8 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Delete per WP:NOTYELLOW, WP:NOTDIRECTORY, with a pile of WP:PROMO thrown in. &mdash; fortuna  velut luna  10:48, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Delete: verging on G11.   Dr Strauss   talk   12:04, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Not even close to a G11. I'd decline that instantly if someone tried that. Terrible assessment of this article. Sergecross73   msg me  02:00, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  So Why  12:35, 10 July 2017 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Cleanup, the article meets WP:GNG. Quidster4040 (talk) 22:16, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ks0stm  (T•C•G•E) 00:33, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Delete -- a directory-like listing complete with 'Products & Service' type of content. Wikipedia is not a sales brochure or investor prospectus. K.e.coffman (talk) 01:14, 19 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Delete in violation of WP:NOTYELLOW.--SamHolt6 (talk) 18:32, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Keep per the significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources.  The book notes: "Two purchases in the late 2000s demonstrate [Macrovision]'s changing agenda and broad approach to information management: the All Media Guide in 2007 and Gemstar-TV Guide in 2008. The All Media Guide (AMG) started off as the brainchild of Michael Erlewine, an eccentric personality who developed a passion for music and astrology in the 1960s. After founding a company that made software for astrological charts in 1977, Erlewine began exploring ideas about music guides and metadata in the early 1990s, just as the CD format was taking hold in the recorded music industry. Frustrated by bad labeling on CDs, he endeavored to create a database of musical recordings that would provide accurate information as well as critical evaluations. Thus AMG was originally founded as the All Music Guide in 1991 and the company has its makeshift headquarters in Big Rapids, Michigan. AMG expanded in scope and size over the course of the decade. In 1994, the company began producing the All Movie Guide, which largely resembled other movie guides of the era and also put a version on the Internet. They even coordinated with the editors of VideoHound, across the state in Detroit, on a volume of screen biographies. In 1998, the company added the All Game Guide to its list of publications/websites, putting it squarely in the business of multimedia reviews. The company relocated to Ann Arbor in 1999, home to the University of Michigan, hoping to find a larger pool of educated pop culture fans for its labor force. AMG continued to expand its operations in the 2000s, primarily moving into media recognition and metadata licensing. It unveiled the LASSO media recognition software in 2006, which enables different media devices to reconigze the exact CD or DVD that is inserted into them. For the consumer, this means that when you enter 'Abbey Road' or Pulp Fiction (1994) into a hardware device, the device recognizes it as that particular disc, as if by magic. In this respect, AMG facilitated the much-hyped technological convergence of the 2000s by allowing hardware devices to reconigze software. Not only did AMG license this capability to a number of different electronics manufacturers, but it also expanded the licensing of its review material. As of 2007, AMG licensed material to over 25,000 different online and brick-and-mortar retail outlets. It counted AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and the New York Times among its online customers and Amazon, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, and Blockbuster Video among its retail customers. Morever, various parts of the AMG database were licensed by the radio giant Clear Channel and a range of computer-based media players, including iTunes, MusicMatch, Windows Media Player, and Napster. Thus by the time Macrovision bought AMG in 2007, both companies had large operations in the realm of entertainment metadata, including software protection, media recognition, and content reviews. ..."  The article notes: "Here, in this soulless part of town, sits a soulless-looking edifice that appears to be some sort of light industrial complex. But this, the world headquarters of Internet giant All Media Guide, is more like the most gargantuan reliquary of pop culture imaginable. Inside that 32,000-square-foot building, a staff of 150 well-trained media and technology geeks set about the task of obsessively cataloging every piece of music, every movie and every video game ever produced. It seems like a Sisyphean task, but after 15 years, the company has amassed an amount of data that's difficult to describe. Consider the following: Deep within the bowels of AMG headquarters is a locked-down room that would make any record geek's knees go weak. Inside that room is the AMG archive. It's 7,000 square feet of cabinets, with boxes stacked on top of cabinets. A whiteboard keeps a running tally: as of Jan. 12, the archive was home to 461,550 albums (multi-disc sets count as one album), 75,259 DVDs and 3,477 games. ... And those are just the physical items AMG owns. The growing database at the moment holds information on more than 8.5 million songs and 900,000 individual albums. If an individual song clocks in at three minutes, it would take 25.5 million minutes to listen to all of those songs — and that computation ignores longer tunes like 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' and the works of Fela Kuti. The company compiles formal data like artist names and titles as well as descriptive content about genre and style. It adds bylined reviews, biographies and ratings, as well as data about similar products and influences. It's a project born of obsession — a wacky idea from the mind of estranged founder Michael Erlewine. And now, this compulsive cataloging of content is paying off for AMG. What at one time must have seemed to many as pointless fetishism is becoming increasingly useful, given the increasing array of digital doodads consumers can use to store and play content." This is a 4,000-word profile of the company.  The article notes: "The recent boost in music bought - versus pirated - over the Internet has given a lift to Pittsfield Township-based All Media Guide, which is now under new ownership - its own. AMG has built up a long list of customers, such as retailers Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble Inc., which purchase its content, including voluminous information on thousands of artists, record reviews and other data. Its music division is called All Music Guide, but the company also operates All Movie Guide and All Game Guide, which review and provide information about current and past movies and video games. AMG has seen rapid growth recently and this year began supplying its data to Apple Computer's iTunes Music store and the newly minted Napster, which was reborn from an embattled peer-to-peer sharing system to a for-fee music service with the blessing of the recording industry."</li> <li> The article notes: "From the outside, the All Media Guide building on the outskirts of Ann Arbor is the antithesis of the funky, incense-and-clutter vibe of a record store. It screams 'business park,' the kind of concrete, asphalt, and brick background where commerce takes place with efficient anonymity. ... Pop a CD into a computer that's hooked up to the Internet and chances are that the album information that comes up on your computer - everything from song titles to album art and reviews - comes from Allmusic.com, which is AMG's signature product. Windows Media Player, Rhapsody, and RealPlayer all use their data base, which contains millions of songs. The massive collection of information, essentially an online encyclopedia, has become a go-to site for everyone from corporate giants like Microsoft's Windows to classical music disc jockeys preparing their shows. With its consumer-oriented reviews, detailed discographies, and biographies it's also a bottomless resource of information and trivia for any kind of music fan, whether it's a Beatles completist or someone trying to find out which Outkast disc they should buy their niece. ... AMG in its current form - with its 150 employees, and massive database of music, movies, and games - is a marriage of cutting-edge technology and old-school curating and cataloging work. Born in the early '90s at the dawn of the compact disc age, the company was formed in a house in Big Rapids, Mich., by a bunch of guys who shared one thing in common: a passion for music. The founder was Michael Erlewine, who played in bands throughout Michigan - including one that featured Iggy Pop - and had an intense interest in astrology and music. ... Macrovision Corp. out of Santa Clara, Calif., announced last week that it plans to purchase All Media Guide for $82 million in an effort to utilize the Ann Arbor company's massive data base in the firm's growing technology business."</li> <li> The article notes: "AMG's All-Music Guide won leading search engine Yahoo's award this year for best music reference site on the Web. ... AMG, the nucleus of the Store 24 concept, was founded by Michael Erlewine, a musician/computer programmer who once traveled with Bob Dylan, and Vladimir Bogdanov, a database expert. They were soon joined by data engineer Chris Woodstra, who is now editor in chief of AMG. In addition to the All-Music Guide, the AMG consumer directories include the All-Movie Guide and the All-Game Guide, which will be available to any AEC retailer in the future, and the soon-to-be-launched All-Book Guide." Here is a second article from the same issue of Billboard: <ul><li> The article notes: "An integral component of AEC's online plans is All Media Guide (AMG), a database company based in Big Rapids, Mich., formerly known as Matrix, which will be moved to Ann Arbor, Mich. That company's products include the All-Music Guide, the All-Movie Guide, the soon-to-be-marketed All Games Guide, and the soon-to-be launched All-Book Guide. The All-Music Guide, which was recently named the best music reference guide on the Internet by Yahoo!, serves as the heart of the Store 24 program, and Weisman expects it to play a growing role as the Internet becomes an important selling tool."</li></ul></li> <li> The article notes: "And AllMusic, formerly known as All Music Guide or AMG, seeks to do the same for music. Every band, every artist, in every genre, gets a biography. Every album, single, EP, and live album that gets a release, no matter how obscure, is catalogued, and AllMusic tries its damndest to review them all, too. AllMusic has quietly become the kind of resource that's so intrinsic to the internet that it's hard to imagine the internet without it. That's partly that's because the internet has never really existed without it. AllMusic predates the World Wide Web, having been founded in 1991 in Big Rapids, Michigan by one exceedingly interesting guy: Michael Erlewine. ... Erlewine founded All Music Guide in 1990, releasing the first All Music Guide book, at a whopping 1,200 pages in 1991, along with a CD-ROM. But the real revolution of All Music Guide was to create a database, on computers, that could be accessed by anyone, that included literally every recording in history. It was an insane project, one that may not even technically be possible, but Erlewine and his team of freelance writers attempted to do just that. The first version was available on Gopher pages, Gopher being kind of a precursor to the World Wide Web, basically a file system. It was moved to the World Wide Web as soon as it became clear that that was the future. ...   Today it is a backbone of the artistic internet. Every music critic and, I'd say, almost every music fan visits AllMusic regularly. Erlewine is no longer directly involved with AllMusic, the company having been sold a few times since the early 2000s. In 2013, Rovi spun off AllMusic and its sister sites, including All Movie Guide, which are now owned by All Media Network. The first president of All Media Network was a former Rovi employee, and Rovi continues to license AllMusic's data to various sites and services. As a matter of fact, Rovi continues to maintain the database, and the various reviewers, like Erlewine's nephew, are employed by Rovi. All Media Network handles the daily editorial content, like interviews, blog posts, and also handles the design of the site."</li> <li> The article notes: "AMG stands for All-Media Guide, too, which includes an All-Movie Guide a year behind the music wing in scope, a fairly new games division, and plans for books and other collectibles. The funding comes from Alliance Entertainment, Inc., a music distributor Erlewine sold out to a couple of years back. But AMG is already a proven money earner. It’s about “relating value.” Yes, most people consume the same records and books. More and more, though, we demand that the rest be available as well— so some grunt has to do the inputting that lets you link everything to everything else. It’s easier to sell records than keep track of them; music chains and online retail sites are compelled to purchase from AMG some mix of formal data, ratings, reviews, descriptive categories, biographies, song credits, album-performer associations, and general reference, available in monthly and weekly updates. “Unlike some Internet companies that are mostly talk and no profit,” Erlewine declares, “our assets are solid. Things that we’ve built, like the databases, are here to stay.”"</li> <li> The article notes: "When surfing the Web, sometimes you just have to sit back and admire a site that's well organized and jammed full of information. Such a site is the All Media Guide, which covers music, movies and video games. For some reason, you have to start at www.allmusic.com  since there's no address for the guide's main page. It's a good place to start. The site has a comprehensive list of essays and music reviews by more than 200 music reviewers from magazines like Rolling Stone and Billboard. The information is broken down by genre and style of music and you can find almost any album or artist you're interested in."</li> <li> The article notes: "The All-Music Guide has long been one of the best resources (both online and in a series of terrific books) for learning more about musicians of all kinds and the music they've created. The All-Game Guide is similar in its ambitious reach, with information broken down by a dozen kinds of game genres and nearly 50 platforms, stretching all the way back to the very earliest, now long-dead consoles (Pong, anyone?). You can search by company (Electronic Arts, unsurprisingly, generates a massive list), by character and much more. The site also has reviews, codes and cheats, difficulty ratings and more for specific games. Its creators still have some substantial work to do because many games lack much or any information, and areas like a guide to notable video-gaming leaders haven't yet been implemented. But the folks behind the All-Music Guide (the general home page has been cannily renamed the All-Media Guide to include sister sites for movies and classical music) built their prodigious database of information by relying on the qualitative input of thousands of fans. As with the All-Music Guide, a player will be able to provide reviews and other information that will help shape how the game is rated, and give other players a sense of its gameplay."</li> </ol>There is sufficient coverage in reliable sources to allow All Media Network to pass Notability, which requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". Cunard (talk) 23:16, 22 July 2017 (UTC) </ul>


 * Comment about promotion: The article is largely neutral. It is not "verging on G11" and it does not violate WP:NOTYELLOW or WP:NOTDIRECTORY. It is standard for parent companies like All Media Network to discuss its subsidiaries. That does not make the article violate WP:NOTDIRECTORY. Cunard (talk) 23:16, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep - per Cunard's sources. I'm okay with redirecting some of the offshoots like Allgame, but not the main parent company. Sergecross73   msg me  23:21, 22 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Related AfDs:<ol><li>Articles for deletion/AllMovie</li><li>Articles for deletion/AllGame</li></ol>Cunard (talk) 23:31, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
 * <small class="delsort-notice">Note: This debate has been included in the list of Video games-related deletion discussions. Izno (talk) 00:25, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

to reply to me 10:28, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep per Cunard's sources. Accusations of WP:NOTYELLOW, WP:NOTDIRECTORY, WP:PROMO, WP:G11 are not supported by the article. Claiming "nothing significant about it" for an article with thousands of incoming links is disingenuous. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:13, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
 *  Keep or merge - Keep, or merge to Michael Erlewine. --Jax 0677 (talk) 03:39, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Keep per Cunard; obviously notable even if the article is incomplete. AllMusic is linked to or mentioned in more than a hundred thousand Wikipedia articles, and AllMovie is linked to in more than 11,000. Jc86035 (talk) <span style="display:inline-block;margin-bottom:-0.3em;vertical-align:-0.4em;line-height:1.2em;font-size:80%;text-align:left">Use &#123;&#123;re&#124;Jc86035&#125;&#125;


 * Keep – Meets WP:CORPDEPTH per a source review. Concerns about promotional tone can be addressed by copy editing the article. North America1000 13:12, 24 July 2017 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.