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The musicians' credits vanished for good!??

I couldn't and still can't believe it: Have you really erased one of the main advantages of your website compared for instance to Spotify? Telling in the credits who, which musician is playing which instrument? Now I mostly find them in the credits only called "primary artist"! Just seen in "Defiant Life", the duo album of Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith: no info that they play keyboards (Iyer) and trumpet (Smith). 
But your detailed credit informations were a main reason why we  presented and portrayed AllMusic thoroughly (with profile and web portrait) on our German arts website "Gespenster der Freiheit" (Phantoms of Liberty).
Why did you do it?
https://gespenster-der-freiheit.de/web-portraet-die-ganze-musik-und-mehr-die-datenbank-allmusic-com/

1 reply

Hi Achim,

Thanks for your longtime interest in AllMusic.

We still capture detailed credits for many of our albums, as you can see on the previous Vijay Iyer album "Compassion":

https://www.allmusic.com/album/compassion-mw0004163952#credits 

In fact, if you'll notice, we recently included a filter so users can drill down into the individual type of credit(s) they are interested in.

Sometimes we will just list "Primary Artist" in the credits for a few different reasons.

1). On a newer release, our data entry team may not have had the time to enter and process all of the individual credits listed on the album. This is considered to be "Light Entry" and the individual credits will be available when the team can catch up and put them correctly in the system.

2). In some cases, the liner notes are incomplete and the info just isn't available. (obviously not the case in this situation).

3). The sheer quantity of music that is being released today is many times more than it has ever been in the past, and the team we have to add this information into the system has not been able to grow with that influx. So there may be some albums that get this lesser level of attention, despite our desire to cover everything as completely as possible.

One thing you can often do (particularly with jazz releases) is click on the album cover on the AllMusic page to view the back cover image, and see if detailed credits are available there:

Zac, I'm hoping that #1 is the constraint and not #3.  Even by zooming in, the scan resolution of the back cover is sometimes not high enough to make legible the smaller font that instruments are often printed (next to larger font for names).