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No Pictures

Unfortunately there are no pictures anymore on the Allmusic website. It's the same wether I use a Windows PC, my Macbook or my IPhone.

How do you suggest I fix this annoying problem

Regards Palle Drost

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26 replies

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We can take a look.

Quick questions: Does the album cover on this page show up?
https://www.allmusic.com/album/thriller-mw0000056882

Or how about these images?
https://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/the-2022-allmusic-readers-poll

Finally, can you let us know which images (if any) display on this page?
https://www.allmusic.com/connectivity-test

It should look like this (if everything is working):

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PD

Thanks for your quick response.

Question 1: Yes MJ is fine

Question 2: Yes but they are all red - maybe they are supposed to be!

Question 3: None of them are visible except the last row below Editorial Assets ..

Regards

Palle

Comment

OK thanks.

One question: Are you using an Adblocker or a VPN to access AllMusic?

The images you can see are coming from our own servers.
The images that are being blocked are coming from our data provider.

You may need to add rovimusic.rovicorp.com to a whitelist or allow that path in some way in order for the images to be displayed.

PD

This is what my screen looks like!

Palle

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A

Hi Zac, I support what Palle said. I have the same problem as him and so do all my friends. So this is obviously not a once in a while case.

Somehow all the links you sent work fine for me including the last one that shows up exactly as in your picture.

However the problem extends also to the e-mail Allmusic sends out. The graphics do not show up:
 

Same if I click on the "Is this email not displaying properly? View The Newsletter In Your Browser" link. The pictures are broken also there.


And the picture are also missing for the albums as Palle pointed out:

In my case it started about two months ago:

  • First, it started with the disappearing of some of the pictures in the mail, but not all of them and the web site worked still fine
  • Then, almost all the pictures in the mail disappeared and the web site started having troubles
  • NOw boith mail and web site does not show most the pictures

Finally, I am not using VPN and Itried this on different PCs and browsers wiith the same result.

Thanks a lot for looking into this. Have been using Allmusic for years anbd years, and it woudl be very sad to not be able to use it anymore.

Thanks, Alessandro.

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PD

I am not using VPN or Addblocker either. 

The rovimusic link doesn't seem to work. 

Regards 

Palle 

Great information. It sounds like our data provider's service are limiting access to your locations for some reason.

Can you both please let me know where you are accessing AllMusic?

What country and city?

A

Sure. Denmark, Copehnagen

Thanks

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PD

Southern Denmark - ;) 

... and thanks

Both Denmark. Hmmm... A couple more questions.

1. If you access this link, what do you see? Is there a specific error it gives you?
https://rovimusic.rovicorp.com/image.jpg?c=CQmXkEkYqiWhs4bsW3R2mlWnbEN5fCjifro6xhIBuB4=&f=4

2. Can you each check and let us know what ISP (Internet Service Provider) you are using?
https://www.whatismyisp.com/

A

I cannot access the link you sent:

My ISP is Telenor A/S

Thanks

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A

PS. For your info, I believe that Telenor and Telia Stofa are both owned by the same company and part of the same infrastructure. Not sure if that helps

Comment

I think we're on to something here.
So we think for some reason your ISP is blocking the links to our data provider.

We'll talk with our data provider to see if there's anything they can encourage from their side.

There are some things you can try from your end as well:

https://www.howtogeek.com/767564/how-to-change-dns-servers-on-windows-11/

https://www.lifewire.com/network-preference-pane-change-macs-dns-settings-2260394

https://1.1.1.1/

PD

Wohoo it works now.

I installed WARP and magic happened - Now the pictures are visible.

Thanks so much for sticking with it :) 

Palle

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PD

Unfortunately the Warp VPN basicly slows everything else down..

Rats.

I think this further points to something being wrong at the ISP level.

I am working with our provider to try to get them to implement an actual solution on their end.

We have tens of thousands of visitors from Denmark every month so I would like to find a permanent solution.

A

Fiddling locally at client level is not the solution as the issue is at CDN level. me and you have two different ISP and the same problem. That means it is at a country level and in any case the CDN provider is the best to analyze why they can't deliver content to Denmark. 

It is a pretty serious issue for the CDN provider to be unreliable. I assume allmusic pays for their services so they should be willing to fix their own issues.

Regards

Alessandro

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Agreed. I am following up with our provider to see if they can determine a cause and a fix.

Following up after some conversations with our data provider. Are either of you still seeing the issue?

A

Sorry but I have to contradict myself. I have a remote PC whose ISP is Telia and that is working fine. As you see in the picture showing up

My primary connection via Telenor is still blacklisted. So apparently Telenor and Telia are not sharing the same infrastructure as I believed. 

Anyway, now we now that not all ISPs are blocked but only some of them.

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PD

It's still the same problem. Nothing's changed ..

Palle

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A

Yes, same problem still here too.

Thanks

Alessandro

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S

Thanks for diligently looking into the root cause of these missing pics!  I have not had any pics for over a year.  I am in Germany and have no Adblocker or VPN active.  My IPS is Vodafone GmbH and I am signed in as a free membership member into AllMusic.  Re. your questions what we can see: 1. )Thriller - I can only see one of the 4 referenced albums listed below the Thriller thumbnail; 2.)  The reader's poll page - I can see thumbnails, but they are all in red only; 3.) the connectivity test - I could see that just like you showed.

I'll cross my fingers that we're going to get somewhere in the root cause analysis of this issue.  I do miss using AllMusic quite a lot, and without pics I find myself not using it anymore.

Thanks!

Comment

If you're still willing, please visit this page and right click to Inspect: https://www.allmusic.com/style/bop-ma0000002457/albums

It displays album covers but no ads so there should be fewer noisy errors.

Please navigate to the Console tab and let us know if there are any error messages specifically around images from rovimusic.rovicorp.com.

Thanks.

A

Palle is there any news on this? As you see it is not only Denmark but I guess most people do not know where to report the issue.

It is gone more than one month since last communication. It should have been enough for the CDN to figure it out. Is that by any chance Cloudfare? Then there is only one solution: just change CDN provider ;-)

Regards,

Alessandro

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From what I understand, our data provider is still looking into this issue.

PD

No news really - I see Zac has replied. Let's see what happens. It works for me when I use a VPN. Shouldn't be necessary.

Regards

Palle   

Here is the update from the people who provide the images:

   > After investigating on our side, it appears that the ISP is blocking traffic to the site.
   >
   > A look at the Chrome console when the page loads would be most helpful to troubleshoot further,
   > but there are no firewall rules blocking source IP ranges to the image service.
   >
   > It seems that resolution would have to be made by the ISP that the users are going through.

If anyone feels savvy, could you go to an AllMusic page with failing images, right click and open Inspector to inspect the page as it is loading?

Navigate to the "Console" tab and let us know if you are seeing any errors around the album cover images that are being blocked?

Likely something like this:

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A

Hej Zac,

Her you go. Knock youself out. I can't even keep up with so many errors that pop up. This is done loading the home page.

BTW. This is typical provider BS, pushing the responsability to the ISP!
Then the DNS provider must explain us why on earth three completely different ISPs should all have decided to block All Music, a perfectly legit site. Where one of the ISP is Vodafone, probably the biggest ISP on earth?

Comment
A

Probably this is better:

Just one thougth. Could it be that the insane amount of advertisement that are loaded are interfering?

Comment

Thanks for troubleshooting. I wish we could see these same issues but since it is working for us, we rely on our users to give us the info we need.

Yeah, the ad companies send along a lot of garbage that causes errors.

The last line item (the error from the Rovimusic address) is along the lines of what we're looking for.

If you're still willing, please inspect this page: https://www.allmusic.com/style/bop-ma0000002457/albums

It displays album covers but no ads so there should be fewer noisy errors.

Please navigate to the Console tab and let us know if there are any more error messages specifically around images.

Thanks again.

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A

Sure. Here you go. There are still quite a lot so I took three shots and have expanded two of the messages  

Comment

Very helpful.

Thanks again.

A

One more note. Some parts of AllMusic come through just fine. For instance this article I just read had no issue with pictures or videos or ads: https://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/jethro-tulls-ian-anderson-new-album-overlooked-tull-salmon-farming?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2023-04-07

Comment

Thanks for the detail.

The images on that page are hosted by us at the website. The ISP seems to have no issue with our own caching and distribution partners used by the website.

The images you are being blocked from seeing are hosted via our data partner who provides us with the album cover images and the portrait images on artist/musician pages. Whatever is delivering those images is conflicting and why you are getting the ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error.

Some suggestions include:

Run CMD as administrator and execute the following commands:

ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /renew
ipconfig /registerdns

or to

Start Chrome in incognito mode with extensions disabled (ctrl+shift+n) and see if your page works now. Note that by default all extensions will be already disabled in incognito mode unless you've specifically set them to run (via chrome://extensions).

Another person found:

Finally I realized the only common thing on both my computers was Malwarebytes. After closing/exiting Malwarebytes the problem was solved. I am now able to ping and access every website. The solution, again, at least in my case: close Malwarebytes

A

Sorry but none of the two tests worked.

About the previous test with the browser logs, seems to me that in that page there were both CDN resources and Rovi direct resources, and both were failing

But I am not expert.

Comment

The issues above with the "!" alert and in yellow indicate that the content loaded but could be done more efficiently.
These are the gray Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and RSS icons at the very top of the page: https://cdn-gce.allmusic.com/images/social/rss_off.svg

The ones in red with the "X" are the ones that fail altogether.

S

Thanks for Malwarebytes comment.  Easy enough to try but unfortunately it didn't bring about any change.  Also after reboot. I have a Mac OS10.13 though.  Here you can a random test result with error message shown by the Firefox console tool:

Comment

Thanks and sorry the suggestions didn't work.

I think the error message you posted is not related to the images not loading.

Checking this specific page should give you the ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error that is at the root of it.
https://www.allmusic.com/style/bop-ma0000002457/albums

S

Changing the DNS settings in my system away from the ISP's (Vodafone) default DNS address, resolves all problems.  I chose Quad9's 9.9.9.9, but others would presumably work as well.  I basically gave up on my ISP's DNS, hoping this won't entail any yet unforeseen other issues down the road.  But most importantly, all of AllMusic's content displays perfectly again.  Interesting note:  my problems must have started about 2-3 years back, because that's when Vodafone bought and replaced my previous ISP Unitymedia, whose DNS appararently had been fine!

Thanks so much, Zac, for your invaluable help!  I am so much looking forward already to enjoying AllMusic's content again!

Comment

So glad you got this resolved but honestly this still stinks for anybody who isn't tech savvy enough to hard-code their DNS settings so we're still hoping to get this resolved between our data provider and the ISPs that seem to be outdated or blocking these images.

For anyone who wants to try setting their DNS to something besides their ISP's default, it is pretty easy and this page has some good steps: https://www.whatismyip.com/google-dns/ (and for Windows 11: https://www.howtogeek.com/767564/how-to-change-dns-servers-on-windows-11/ )

A

Thank you for keeping focus on this Zac. As you stated changing the DNS is a work around we already knew but not the final solution.

From a commercial point of view it is important for allmusic to know that they can reach all their users no matter what DNS they are using. It is obvious.

Also changing DNS is the preferred IT solution for all the world problems :-) so often conflicting changes are suggested. I had issues with performance of my ISP and the first thing they asked was to put the DNS back or they will not look at the problem at all.

All the best

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