Brave New Worlds - Updates to AllMusic

The internet is a rapidly-changing place and since our most recent updates to the design of AllMusic were in 2013, we've needed to make some upgrades to the layout and functionality of the site. We hope that they are seen as improvements (but let's face it, we've been through multiple times over the decades and nobody likes change).

The primary change you'll see is that the ways to navigate within pages has changed (or rather changed back, in some ways). Now you can jump to the artist's discography, credits, awards or other information by using the links that are pinned to the side of the screen. Additionally, the information for an artist or an album can all be displayed on one long page (as opposed to jumping through multiple pages). Hopefully this feels a little bit "Web 1.0" but in a positive way.

The new layout uses slightly larger font and spacing for improved readability, and to help users on mobile devices click links and buttons more cleanly. The page is wider to allow us to place ads in a less obtrusive way and to avoid overlapping page content wherever possible. Ads are nobody's favorite topic but they are a requirement to keep the site up and running. The additional site width also allows for more information to be displayed and sorted, so things like average user ratings can appear in more places.

Some additional cool features include: A stand-alone page for an archive of daily Staff Picks.

Celebrating famous musicians' birthdays on the homepage:

AllMusic Birthdays

An easier way to get to our annual Year In Review features (right at the top of each page).

More visual tools in our type-ahead search box to find what you're looking for more easily. Highlighting albums released on this day on the homepage:

Album Release Dates

A more robust and visual user profile area (with more additional features to come).

We've done rigorous testing and QA on multiple browsers and devices, but bugs always pop up in situations like this.

If you see something broken or just not working, please let us know in the comments below.

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PR

"The new layout uses slightly larger font and spacing for improved readability, and to help users on mobile devices click links and buttons more cleanly."

The new layout certainly is pretty and it may be more usable on a phone, but on my desktop it seems way too spread out and necessitates lots of scrolling. As a paid subscriber, I don't even have ads mucking things up. Is there any possibility of maintaining the former layout, too, or alternatively having the ability for users to select among layout sizes in Settings? Many thanks. Peter

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> So the only way to rate an album now is by being on its page?

For the most part.

You can also rate albums in your "My Collection" page in your profile: https://www.allmusic.com/user/my-collection and on the Recommendations page https://www.allmusic.com/recommendations

Seems that sorting by 'User Ratings' is bugged in the discography sections - it doesn't quite display them in the correct order yet. Or at least not in numerical order, as it did with the previous layout.

Also kinda disappointed that 'sort by artist name' wasn't added to the advanced search. Hopefully that (and search by user ratings) is still in the pipeline.

As mentioned above, the new layout seems designed with mobiles primarily in mind. I agree that there's a lot more scrolling down for desktop/laptop users. I also can't help but feel the interface is not as agile - drop-boxes look slicker than markers and tabs but also require more clicks, taking longer to navigate. Gonna miss it. Still, don't blame the team for wanting to change things after ten years.

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Hey Matski, The sorting by User Ratings is indeed "bugged" if you are looking at "All" albums in a discography. Seems to be OK when we look at Main Albums or Singles & EPs. We'll definitely look into it.

In regards to not being able to sort the Artists (or user ratings) in Advanced Search, both are something we're hoping to employ at some point.
This is a feature where we pass in the parameters to a service and that service brings back the results a chunk at a time. They have a couple of built-in sorts (Album title A-Z, AllMusic Rating, Year) but the additional sorts are not available from them.

Thanks for news. It's good to know that you're aware of those two issues.

Another change I've noticed is that users can no longer see or select user ratings from the discography section. There's no column or pop-up when selected with a cursor. Users now have to go to the album's page to rate it. Are there any plans to reinstate this feature?

Did want to mentioned that the new page selection tool on the advanced search page is a big plus. Much better than having to click 'next' multiple times, to find the page I want.

> There's no column or pop-up when selected with a cursor.

We always called these little hover boxes "Tooltips" and when researching this redesign, we found that the vast majority of other sites have done away with this kind of pop-up on their sites. Some users did like them, but others found them to be a nuisance when just moving their mouse cursor across the page.

In addition, they were a bit of a technical headache to maintain (the widget that we were using to have the info pop in was no longer being supported). Hover-over tooltips also aren't able to be implemented in mobile (where the majority of our traffic is).

We opted to not implement them, and wanted to wait for user feedback to see if anyone was using them. If there is a massive public outcry we may try to see if we can work them back into the site using new code or a new tool. If most users didn't use them or are glad to see them gone then they will likely remain retired.

So the only way to rate an album now is by being on its page?

T

From experience, I'm always worried about new layouts, but so far, I think it's nice! Thanks guys!

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Just to give you a heads-up Zac, sorting by user ratings is bugged when searching under 'Main Albums' too. See below picture:

Comment

Looks like we need to include a secondary sort there. The average user ratings (red stars) are showing appropriately in order, but I would prefer to see the album with a higher quantity of ratings ranked higher than the one with fewer ratings.

Thanks.

Similar to how it previously worked then? That would be an improvement. Hopefully you'll be able to figure it out and implement it soon.

The secondary sort on number of user ratings for albums with the same average user ratings should be in place now.

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-replacements-mn0000422405#discography

Please let us know if you are not seeing it.

Hmm, it does work when 'Main Albums' it selected but if 'All' is selected, it orders them using some hidden average between the quantity of votes and the rating.

Man, I thought we nailed this. We'll need to dig back into it.

Thanks for the detailed response.

Thanks for looking into it. On a Saturday no less. No weekends off for you?

No rest for the wicked.

Zac, still not working for any filter if you sort by user ratings for Kris Kristofferson.

P.S. I'm NOT following this long thread.

Yeah. We're still seeing some issues in some situations.

We have a bug filed for it.

Inching closer...

C

Album Picks used to be visible in an artist's discography, but they have disappeared in the new design. Applies also to track-picks of an album. I use "Roon", there albums/tracks are still marked.

Under Firefox (Mac) the ads are not hidden, even though I have a "Paid Subscription". With Safari it works.

And why do the artist pages have a dark background and the rest of the site does not. Does not leave a very consistent impression.

All in all, I'm not very happy about the relaunch. At least for now ;-).

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Album Picks and Track Picks are still available on the site.

Look for the blue highlighted row in an artist's discography: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/nick-drake-mn0000336783#discography

or the blue highlighted rows on an album tracklist: https://www.allmusic.com/album/five-leaves-left-mw0000189840#trackListing

Regarding subscription issues, it is a problem we're actively working on.

As part of the site update we also updated the codebase, thus encryption methods changed. 
 
Clearing cache and removing any old cookies might be best way to get everything back working properly (with no old cookies lingering to confuse and conflict with the new code).
https://www.lifewire.com/clear-cookies-for-one-site-4587347
 
If you are seeing ads on previously visited pages, clearing your cache should remove the ads.
 
or doing a Hard Refresh of the page:
 
Sorry about that.

Regarding dark backgrounds vs light backgrounds, this is very similar to what we did on the old site.

"Content" pages (like album pages, artist pages, song pages, classical compositions, etc) use a dark background.
On the old site, those pages had a black background on the top half of the page, and a gray background on the bottom half of the page.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230826031813/https://www.allmusic.com/album/five-leaves-left-mw0000189840

"Feature" pages (the homepage, new releases, genre pages, articles) continue to have the gray background they've always had.

C

Thanks so far. On the subject of picks: for me, all albums or tracks are highlighted in blue. View with Firefox, Safari, Chrome (Mac). Or is there something I don't understand?

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C

Sorry, in the meantime I got it :-)

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Hi @clickmusic

Great question. None of the albums in this screenshot have been selected as Album Picks by the editors.

If you look at the "Compilations" by the Rolling Stones, or look at "All" albums by the Rolling Stones, you'll see that the compilation "Forty Licks" has been selected as the best place to start for new listeners.

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-rolling-stones-mn0000894465#discography

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C

Just to add: deleting the old cookies has solved the problem of unwanted ads. Thanks for the help!

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HF

The new layout is really causing me problems.  I am a 60+ year old with bad eyesight.  My computer an browser are both set up to use larger font sizes and "zoomed" sizes.  The new design does not accommodate this.  Techniques for responsive design are not new and I can't imagine why they haven't been used.

Also, if you are going to use infinite scrolling, why do you have a footer?  To access the help tool, I actually to open up dev tools to get the url from the footer.

TBH, I think this is just bad.  I have experience in this area and I know if could have been much better.

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Hi Howard,

Sorry the zoomed function is causing issues with AllMusic.
We're looking into ways to improve this use case.

For the most part, zooming the text seems to function properly, with the exception being the navigation in the header (at the top of the page).
Does this match what you are seeing?
Or are there other non-usable functions on the site when zoomed in?

In regards to the footer and infinite scroll, we only use infinite scroll on the homepage and in search results, and both of these have a point where the scroll stops and asks the user if they want to read more. The vast majority of pages do not use infinite scroll.

HF

Hi Zac - the issue is that the layout doesn't change so diving into an artist requires lots of scrolling left and right.  Do that too quickly on most browsers, that triggers the back function.

After a couple of weeks, I've gotten more used to it but the amount of empty space in that left nav still makes using it painful.

I'd like to reproduce the scenario you're describing.

If possible, could you send some screenshots of what you're seeing to support (at) allmusic (dot) com?

Or can you let us know what browser you are using and the Zoom settings you have enabled?
Are you set to zoom to 200%? 300%?

Can you go to this page and send us the URL it creates for you (next to the green button that says "Copy")
T

Something that really bothers me is that it is no longer possible to right-click links, say to the 'Discography' section, to open it in a new tab. This would be a straightforward way for users to be less affected by the way you've divided pages into compartments, and I don't see why you would want to disable it. So please, if it's just an oversight, it would be great if it's restored.

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We can look into this.

Can you describe the use case you are trying to accomplish with this?

What is the value of clicking the tab and going to a new screen vs clicking the tab and being taken directly to the information?

Are you placing the views side-by-side to see more info on your monitor at one time? Just curious how this is being used.

Thanks.

T
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Thanks for the reply, I understand it may not be entirely obvious why people need this. :) I may be on an artist page browsing, for example, because I've lined up a couple of albums by a certain artist to listen to, and while continuing to browse other sections, I may want to keep the discography section open to consult later as I listen my way through the playlist. Of course, one might open numerous tabs and navigate to the same place again, but it's much easier if you can just right-click to do this.

PR

Hi tv. I can work around this by Ctrl left-click (Firefox in Windows 10) -- link opens in new tab, preserving the original tab. I use this method to easily get back to the "All Songs" list for a certain letter of the alphabet after looking at a link to a song that has multiple versions.

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T
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This oddly does not work for me.

Hi Peter,

This does work if you are clicking on a specific song or album link, but does not work if you are clicking on the blue tabs on the left side (things like Discography, Biography, Songs, etc).

RG

I have a paid account. For more years than I care to remember, I've enjoyed and relied upon the All Music site to inform me and help in building my music library. A significant piece of that has always been the ability to print the AMG review and track listing of an album. Since the recent update, the album page no longer prints correctly. Ancillary information on the page prints, but no text from the review or track listing is contained in the print. I get the same results from both Chrome and Edge. I can only hope that this is not by design, but rather an unintended consequence of the format change. Could you please look into this and let me know the status of this situation? Thanks.

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Hi Russ,

As an online website, we don't really structure our pages to be printed out on paper to be saved for later.
Apologies.

The information on the old site was all delivered to the page at one time, when the user first loaded the page.
This made the pageloads slower than they needed to be (especially for artists like Duke Ellington or albums like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" which had a lot of information to present to the user).

This also negatively impacted our Google Search Results because the pages were heavy and slow, meaning we lost users and fewer people could find AllMusic.
When fewer people find AllMusic, our viewership declines, which means that fewer people subscribe to our sites or view our ads, which means we can no longer afford to be in business.

The new model builds the shell of the page, and then presents information as the user requests it.
This is faster, lighter, and should be more appealing to both Google (where we get the majority of our traffic) and overall users.

It sounds like the downside of this is that by calling the text information after the initial page load, for some reason it will not allow the page to be printed out.

This was an unintended consequence of this redesign, because we didn't anticipate that users would be printing out our pages.

Apologies for making this unavailable to you, but we do not have plans to revert back to the heavier, slower method of delivering data, even if that means the pages are not available to be printed out.

A

I have an old All Music Guide 2nd Edition (book) that I used to love flipping through.  I can't imagine printing out pages from the web site but I can understand the desire to have a hard copy.

A

The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop

Summary: Mobile-first web designs cause significant usability issues when viewed on desktop. Content becomes overly dispersed across long scrolling pages with expansive white space and enlarged images and fonts, making it difficult for users to consume and understand the information.

 
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T
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One way to improve this issue, in my opinion, would be to have the (often very long) biography section closed by default, or display the discography higher than the biography section. I may be wrong, but I would think most people are looking for the discography first and foremost - in any case, I certainly am.

@tv

One thing that may not be clear is that you can click on the big blue tab at the top of the Biography section to close it.

This brings up the Discography tab higher up the page to click on it and expand it.

To your point, we have always traditionally gotten more traffic to the Biography tab (in the old site design) so we opted to make that one open by default.

T
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Perhaps the website could use a cookie to remember that I closed that section, and keep the section closed whenever I visit the website afterwards? That would be great.

We used to try to enable a lot of user preference info in cookies and while we do see some value in it, it made the codebase very heavy and complex, constantly trying to read from cookies what the user's previous state was and then quickly close one feature and open another. This kind of thing can also cause the page to jump around (which makes Google very upset).

We're not saying adding additional user preference/last state functionality is completely off the table, but it opens a new set of concerns and tricky possible states we'd need to make sure are bulletproof.

Thanks.

T
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I do understand, but for this particular case, I think it might improve user experience a lot. In any case, just my two cents, thanks for the explanation!

T

I liked the ability to see 'Similar albums' as a list and sort them by rating or date, and would love to see this brought back.

Somewhat relatedly, one of my biggest desires for the site would be for AllMusic star ratings to be available in the credit sections like they are in the discography section, as now I often find myself clicking all of the items just to find out which ones are highly rated.

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Similar Albums now is available in a list view and you can sort them by a number of different categories:

https://www.allmusic.com/album/revolver-mw0000189174#similarAlbums

T
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Great, thanks!

Any chance of star ratings for the artist page's credits section, one fine day? :)

PR

FWIW, I agree with tv: it's a nuisance to keep manually closing the Bio section, which I've resorted to doing.

Thanks.

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Hi Peter,

Are you using the site largely on desktop/laptop or in mobile?

PR

Nearly, exclusively desktop, Zac.

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Ok, thanks.

In case it isn't clear, you can also just click on the blue Discography tab on the left-hand side of the screen and be taken directly to the Discography (or any other tab) without needing to navigate around or close the existing tab that is already open.

Our hope was that by having that static navigation section always available on the left side, users could jump to whatever section they were interested in quickly and without additional scrolling.

T

Something that very (increasingly?) regularly happens to me, and that never happened on the old site, is that I type what I want to search for in the search box on top, and then it just disappears when I press enter, and nothing happens. This sometimes happens 3 or 4 times in a row, and then, without reloading, it suddenly works again. Is this happening to anyone else? I'm using Firefox.

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Hmmm.. We haven't seen this in testing but we'll give it a shot.

Does this seem to happen at a particular time of day? Or is it random?

PR

Yes, tv, that happened to me too, when the new version first rolled out. However, it hasn't happened lately. Growing pains?

It was aggravating, and contributed to me initially not liking the change. Happily, I'm getting used to it, although if the "old" AMG were still available, I'd use it instead.

T
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A particular time of day I can't say, but it tends to happen a number of times in a row before resolving itself. Maybe there's something that needs to load and lags behind sometimes? I'm not sure.

PR

Yes, tv, that happened to me too, when the new version first rolled out. However, it hasn't happened lately. Growing pains?

It was aggravating, and contributed to me initially not liking the change. Happily, I'm getting used to it, although if the "old" AMG were still available, I'd use it instead.

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K

Your new design is utter rubbish.

The ongoing problem of intrusive advertisements is even worse. Sometimes the menu appears at the top - which is standard web design - and sometimes the advertisement pushes it down the page. If I scroll downward to select from the personalised (logged in) menu (Artists I follow, Collections, etc) the advert (sometimes more than one) intrudes into the view and pushes that menu downward. I select an item in that menu and the page reloads, with the advert back in the way. Does that get counted as two advert views? If so you are ripping off your advertisers AND your users.

Attempts to sort the discography for an artist do not work reliably e.g. select 'All albums' and the same list appears as by default ('Main albums'). The other drop-down has no effect either e.g. try to sort new-to-old and the same default listing still appears. (No query seems to be triggered).

The Collection Builder has either been killed off or hidden somewhere. I must now search for an artist, find the album I'm looking for, pop the button to add it to collection, and then do it again. By default the Collection is alphabetic (which isn't even an option on the drop-down if you change the preferred sort). When you select, for example Oldest First, the sort order is untrustworthy. Newest first seems not to display any album released since about 2021.

The whole thing is utterly random and I absolutely cannot believe it has even been beta tested. Do not pay your web design invoice as you have been cruelly ripped off.

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Hi KaEL.

We'll look into the ad issues you mention.
Are you seeing ads appear ABOVE the main navigation menu at the top of the page?
If so, can you provide a screenshot?

We are not seeing any of the issues within the discography you are mentioning.

Can you go to this page and send us the URL it creates for you (next to the green button that says "Copy")
BD

Awesome update,was worth the wait!

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