With a three-year head start and funding that Schreiber could only dream about, Allmusic initially seemed on its way to internet dominance, but the site’s rather bland comprehensiveness would turn out, somewhat counterintuitively, to be limiting. Erlewine’s error can be found in the assumption that what people wanted was an encyclopedic survey of music itself. Pitchfork knew that what people actually wanted was an encyclopedia of musical taste.
by Richard Beck
