Hi, I'm a big fan of AllMusic and have used the site for years. One thing I've always wanted to know is the date an album review was written, to put it into context as either a contemporary or retrospective review, as critical consensus can change over the years. Is this technically possible at all? Thanks.
Hi Philip,
We understand the value of this request but it probably won't be implemented for a couple reasons.
One is that we haven't tracked this historically so the vast majority of the album reviews would not have a date. In addition, there are often edits and updates over the years where an error may be corrected or an entire review might be revised, so we would have needed to track which reviews have been re-thought and which ones just needed a correction or two.
The other (admittedly foolish-sounding) reason is that search engines take the recency of updates into account when deciding how trustworthy or current the information on the page is, and rank sites with older dates lower than sites that don't have date information, so if we started publishing that many of our classic reviews are from the 1990s, our search ranking would likely go down and fewer users would visit our pages.
Thanks.
