New All Music Guide a Disappointment
One of my favorite music sites, All Music Guide, has recently undergone a facelift, and the result is not pretty. AMG has tons of information for just about any artist, often including album reviews. And the reviews often jive with my take on the albums, so I know that the reviewer is generally a fan of that type of music. It just seems like the new interface is more cluttered and information is too many clicks away. The main artist “Overview” page no longer lists the discography. Instead, we get a bunch of semi-useful information like “Influenced By” and “Similar Artists”. While these things are good to know, I’d have to say the discography is a helluva lot more important than similar artists. And then once you view a particular album review, only part of the review is shown with the track listing. If you want to read the whole review by clicking “Read More”, you lose the track listing, making it confusing to follow the review at times. And it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of screen real estate to handle this. It’s just poorly managed. I really didn’t find too much wrong with the old site. Sure there were some minor flaws, but the only thing that bugged me was their dumb URL scheme. They made it hard to copy and paste a URL of an artist or album into an email or as a hyperlink since the URL looked like it always had some random characters in it. Why couldn’t they put the album and artist name into the URL somehow? Something along the lines of Pitchfork record reviews. My advice (as if anyone from AMG is listening): go back to the old site, but fix the URLs!