User:Fezmar9/The Allmusic Trickle-Down Effect

Allmusic is the highly-respected and widely-used music subdivision of the media archiving company the All Media Guide. Allmusic collects and publishes basic information about albums such as track listing, release dates, album credits and often times a review. For artists, there will typically be a biography, discography, known band members and other basic information. Allmusic is owned by Rovi Corporation (formerly known as Macrovision), who also distribute the archived information to dozens of other online resources.

The phenomena hereby referred to as The Allmusic Trickle-Down Effect occurs when Allmusic makes a mistake in their archive, and Rovi unknowingly distributes this mistake across the web. This gives the appearance that multiple sources agree on a piece or body of information, when this may or may not be the case.

Affected websites

The following is a list of websites known to directly mirror information from Allmusic: AOL, Artistdirect, Billboard, Metacritic, MSN Music, Microsoft-related websites, MTV, Rolling Stone, VH1, Yahoo!. In addition to some concert ticket outlets such as Ticketmaster and radio station websites, many online music retailers such as Amazon.com, Barnes & Nobel, iTunes, MuchMusic, Napster, Pandora Radio, Rhapsody and Zune also mirror Allmusic's information. Because many of these websites are major media publications that are frequently used as sources of information by other websites, the Allmusic Trickle-Down Effect may also indirectly influence several other websites as well.

Handling the Trickle-Down Effect

The Allmusic Trickle-Down Effect typically only yields minor problems at worst that can be solved with a little common sense, but it's still an issue editors should be aware of when contributing material and building artist/album articles. Typical issues may include incorrect release dates, incorrect track titles (possibly with issues of typos), incorrect or incomplete album credits, an incorrect record label and improper categorization of release types. If you feel that Allmusic is displaying incorrect information, please provide an alternate source and consider placing a note on the talk page.

It may also be the case that multiple sources that mirror Allmusic's information are being used as references in a single article. For example, an artist's Wikipedia page may be using the biographies found on MTV, Billboard and VH1 as references. These three sources all use Allmusic's biography and are essentially the same source. In the event of a case similar to this, replace all of the mirrored references with the original Allmusic biography.

It's also good practice to inform Allmusic of any mistakes they have made in their archives. Every Allmusic page has a link titled "Corrections to this Entry?" where readers can submit corrections with a source supporting the change. It's located at the bottom of the infobox running down the left side of each page. However, the corrections submission page gives the following disclaimer: "AMG reads all feedback from our site users, however, due to the extremely high volume of messages received, we unfortunately cannot guarantee that we will be able to respond in every case."

The Trickle-Down Effect and notability

The Allmusic Trickle-Down Effect can also give a false sense of notability. It may be possible for a non-notable group or album to be given the appearance of having multiple reliable third-party sources providing significant coverage on a topic by using many websites which mirror Allmusic's information as references. If Allmusic is the only source of information available, then the subject may not meet the general notability guidelines.

Examples

• The Allmusic discography for the American hardcore punk group Converge mistakingly lists several releases by the English dance music group of the same name. Because Allmusic says the American group released a DVD in 2009 titled Spiritual Practices[1], so then does MTV[2] and AOL Music[3] despite the fact that this was released by the English group. The same goes for the English group's EP Stutter[4] which can be purchased through iTunes[5] mistakingly categorized as the American group's EP.