About Me

Even as a small child, I was very interested in music and got a lot of pleasure from my brother's record collection. Since about 1982 I started to buy records and CDs from my first self-earned money as a newspaper boy. My focus is to collect all released songs of an artist, not all released LPs or CDs (see Info).

My collection became large very quickly because I had a lot of favorite artists. At first my focus was on Pop music (e.g. Madonna, George Michael, Simply Red, Swing Out Sister and Wet Wet Wet), then later R&B and Soul (e.g. Whitney Houston, Vesta Williams and Will Downing). Finally, my love for Jazz music developed (e.g. David Benoit, Russ Freeman, Hiromi Uehara, Diana Krall and Jane Monheit).

99,9% of the recordings listed are also in my collection, only three recordings are missing:

• Oleta Adams: Self-titled Cassette from 1986 (Rolling Snowball Productions)
• James Ingram: Someone Like You / Maxi-CD from 1993 (Warner Bros. Records Australasia - 5439185312)
• Marlene with Seawind: Summer Nights / Promo 12"-Maxi from 1982 (CBS/Sony Japan - XDAH 93023)

Since 2009, I have been able to enjoy my passion for music in the form of LP-Reviews, which I write for the german HiFi magazine "LP - Magazin für analoges HiFi & Vinyl Kultur".

I have been running this website as a non-profit project since 1999. Initially, the website was available at www.musik-datenbank.de, later www.soul-jazz-pop.com and www.discographies.online. Since 2009, the web address has been music-was-my-first-love.com, inspired by the legendary song by John Miles from 1976. Due to indexing problems of google, since May 2025 the web address finally changed to artistarchiv.es.

I had the honour of providing some label scans for the 2009 reissue of the significant album "What Am I Gonna Do" by Gloria Scott, produced by Barry White (Reel Music - 66748-78012-2, Universal Music Special Markets - B0012577-02).

Over the years, personal contacts to some musicians have developed through my collection.

The code for this website was created entirely by Anthropic's AI system Claude.