All Media Guide

All Media Guide (commonly known as AMG), is a company that owns and maintains Allmusic, Allgame and Allmovie. AMG was founded in 1990 by popular-culture archivist Michael Erlewine. In late 2007, Macrovision (now Rovi) acquired AMG for a reported $72 million.

History

Rovi offices, Ann Arbor

The company was founded in Big Rapids, Michigan in 1991, in order to create a comprehensive archive of all music. AMG moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1999. AMG was a business unit within Alliance Entertainment Corporation until early 2005. Yucaipa Companies, a multi-billion dollar fund based in California, retained ownership of AMG. Macrovision (Rovi) announced on November 6, 2007 that it had agreed to purchase All Media Guide. All of its websites are now controlled by Rovi's nameservers. The encompassing website that was once allmediaguide.com is now allrovi.com.

AMG has created a large database of metadata about movies, video games, audio books, and music releases. These databases are used for point of sale systems in tens of thousands of stores globally, for CD and DVD recognition in software media players such as Windows Media Player, SimpleCenter and Musicmatch Jukebox, and for providing content for a variety of websites.

In addition to selling computerized access to its databases, AMG sells several dozen print compilations of its information.

Products

Lasso

In late-2004, AMG launched a new product called LASSO. AMG LASSO is a media recognition service that automatically recognizes CDs, DVDs, and digital audio files such as MP3, Ogg, AAC, and WMA files. Once media is recognized, metadata from AMG's All Music and All Movie databases is delivered directly to the player. LASSO is available as an SDK for personal computer software developers, and an embedded version of LASSO is available for consumer electronics devices. It is advisable to use caution when working with such software, as it generates logs at Macrovision that could be used in the prosecution of even unintentional crimes involving copyright infringement of audio-visual works.^{[citation needed]}

Other products:

Productname Description Tapestry Arranges (music) collections. Data Licensing Commercial data licensing of the 3 databases Games, Movie and Music SonicGuide Music sampling tool See also Allgame AllRovi Allmusic External links Make it or break it: How a small-town music fetishist turned an obsession into a multimillion-dollar All Media Guide (Metro Times, Detroit) All Music (Wired, Feb. 1994) All Rovi Allgame Allmovie Allmusic LASSO