[Web4lib] Where to find discography info

[Lars Aronsson]

When you google for something that you think is commonplace and 
find almost nothing, you have to think if maybe its 1996 again and 
nobody has written a webpage about this or that.  Wake up!

For book titles, publishers, writers, and translators, there are 
Open WorldCat and RedLightGreen in addition to catalog.loc.gov. 
For movie actors, directors and titles, there is IMDb.com.

But where do you go for music information?  I was under the 
impression that allmusic.com was going to become the IMDb.com for 
music, but the meager contents always disappoints me.  How many 
songs and albums are in there, and how many should be?  Does 
anybody have the numbers? And music.yahoo.com is just as bad.

One recent example in my search history is reggae producer Joe 
Gibbs.  Allmusic.com lists only three records produced by him.  
Maybe more albums are listed, but without label information.
Wikipedia has a biography and lists 12 albums and 23 compilations, 
and this is still far from complete,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Gibbs_%28record_producer%29
Just look at how many of the links to artists are still red,
indicating that no Wikipedia articles exist yet.

If this man had printed books, I would be surprised if the LoC 
didn't catalog *every* title he put on the market.

When I google for a group or a song from the 1970s and all I find 
is an occasional eBay auction, I know there are no fan pages, no 
Wikipedia entries.  Is popular music inherently non-literal, the 
real fans don't write?  Or is it libraries that don't "get" music?

At e.g. http://www.lib.umn.edu/site/reference.phtml
there is a heading for "reviews (book and film)", but who indexes 
reviews of music recordings?  Is there a JSTOR for pop culture 
magazines?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se