Once there was a pipe dream of an infinite faucet of music that could be turned on and (nearly) every song ever recorded would be available to hungry listeners and curious audiophiles. Crate diggers and long tail explorers will always find holes in any major online music provider, but over the past several years the adoption of streaming services has expanded to surpass physical media and digital music purchases. We’re happy to announce a project to add the ability to stream music directly from AllMusic album and artist pages.
Now on many album and artist pages, you’ll find embedded streaming players for Spotify and Amazon Music, where you can listen to full tracks if you are signed in to either of those services. If you are not a Spotify or Amazon Music user, you can still listen to the 30-second sound clips to better explore and get a feel for the album.
Additionally, if you are logged in, you can set a preference for your streaming service via your user account settings. By selecting the streaming service you prefer, that playlist will display first on the album and artist pages on AllMusic.
In the event that we don’t have your preferred service linked, we’ll fall back to whatever service we have available. Beyond Spotify and Amazon Music, we’re also looking into adding other streaming partners like Apple Music and YouTube Music, but we’re hampered a little bit by the ease of access to their data sets in linking our content to theirs. In the future we also hope to enable methods for users to submit links to albums we may not have linked yet, to get even more coverage of your favorite music on the site.
Longtime users will recall that we used to have audio sound clips associated with the tracks on AllMusic album pages, and since those went away we’ve been looking for other solutions that will allow our users to preview music. Hopefully with the addition of these streaming solutions, we’ve brought some of that back.
We’re working to cover more and more of our catalog with these links and will continue to add these streaming widgets to pages as we go. Hopefully this gives our music fans more reasons to visit the site to explore and discover more music, our ongoing mission for three decades now.
