Short answers, pulled from the story.
Michael Erlewine founded AllMusic in 1990 in Big Rapids, Michigan. He created the organization after discovering a poor quality rehash of Little Richard recordings on a compact disc in the early 1990s.
The first All Music Guide was published in 1992 as a 1,200-page reference book packaged with a CD-ROM. The title was All Music Guide: The Best CDs, Albums & Tapes: The Expert's Guide to the Best Releases from Thousands of Artists in All Types of Music.
By February 1999, AllMusic had cataloged 350,000 albums and two million tracks. The site also published biographies of 30,000 artists, 120,000 record reviews, and 300 essays during that period.
Alliance Entertainment Corp. purchased AllMusic from Michael Erlewine in 1996 for a reported $3.5 million. This transaction resulted in Erlewine leaving the company and Alliance filing for bankruptcy in 1999.
AllMusic developed a list of 1,400 subgenres of music to distinguish itself from other databases. The first online version launched in 1994 as a text-based Gopher site before moving to the World Wide Web.