Sound Samples No Longer Available on AllMusic

Unfortunately our data provider is no longer making the 30-second sound clips of songs available to us.

It was a huge undertaking to rip the music clips from physical and digital sources, and then to host and deliver those clips (in multiple formats). They've determined that while the feature was appreciated, they could no longer support the business case of providing it as a product.

We understand that this was an important part of exploring and discovering music on the site and we're investigating other partnerships to try to bring the sound clips or streaming options back.

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S

Thank you for the prompt response Zac.  It’s clear now how the system worked and why the existing sound clips are not  available anymore. Out of curiosity, could we know the name of the group who formally supplied the samples?  Cheerz 

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We receive the majority of our metadata from a company called Xperi / TiVo. This includes the album reviews, track listings, artist biographies, similar artists, similar albums, and, formerly, the sound samples.

https://business.tivo.com/products-solutions/metadata/music-metadata

S

So, what about all the sound clips that were available before said data provider decided to stop making more?

Why have they been taken down after the 'huge undertaking'? You need to explain to your legends of fans!

There's more to this than what's been stated!

Waiting to hear from you AllMusic! I know you won't respond. AllSilent

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Great question.

It isn't just the sampling of new things that come out, but also the hosting and delivery of all of the existing samples. They have decided to stop providing these samples to their customers.

They had servers filled with tens of millions of sound clips in multiple formats and multiple encodings and an entire infrastructure to deliver each of them individually. Since it costs more money to host and deliver them than they were able to get customers to pay for, they made the decision to stop offering it as a service.

Zac, I don't believe that Allmusic can be fully supported by the current subscription model because I happen to like ads (as long as they don't significantly slow down loading speed).  I think that you should changing its model to one where users pay per use of certain features.  For example, some users would be willing to pay 10 cents per song sample.

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T

I'm sorry, but what? Ten cents for a sound sample? The transaction fees alone would eat up every single bit of revenue (and that's assuming anyone would pay it, which they wont).

Think of how terrible the user experience would be if you clicked on a sound sample and a pop-up appeared, asking you to create an account and enter your credit card details to listen to 15 seconds of a song? If you want to kill AllMusic, by all means, institute a ten cent charge for a sound sample.

I know your intentions are good, but there are other ways to monetize this incredible database of music knowledge and history. Micro-transactions aren't one of them.

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