All Music Guide: The Best CDs, Albums and Tapes: The Experts' Guide to the Best Releases from Thousands of Artists in All Types of Music

by Michael Erlewine (Editor), Scott Bultman (Editor)

Fast becoming a classic music reference, this comprehensive and easy-to-use guide to 23,000-plus top recordings in 22 categories produced by more than 6,000 artists and groups. Arranged by genre, this guide covers classical, jazz, country, blues, pop, rock, folk, world beat, children's music, and more. 40 charts.

Genres: Music, Reference, Nonfiction

1176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Eric Hines · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first and best of these guides. Though the number of albums listed can be annoyingly few for some artists, the reviews tend to be a lot better than in later editions--partially because this was written before AMG reviews were conceived primarily as enticements to buy; partially because the reviewers and licensed reviews were just plain better than they've become. Reviewer favorite albums in the front is a good feature they should have stuck with.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a certain lowest-common-denominator homogeneity to the recommendations in this book. It's a slapdash hodgepodge thrown together by an army of freelancers and as such there's much to disagree about in what's excluded vs. what's included. But the scope is ambitious and it's fun to have something like this around as reference.