The pop music listener in the 21st Century is facing an astonishing bombardment of compilation records, encyclopaedias and handbooks, all of which claim to present a definitive account of the music they purportedly represent. This trend has so far reached its highest point in compilations which pretend to offer in the course of their twenty tracks or so the 'ultimate' record of a particular genre or era, and increasingly slim handbooks which aim to do the same in writing. There is currently no reason to believe that it will not be followed to its logical and absurd conclusion.

We have therefore identified an urgent need for a remedy and a concerted effort against the trend. The musical knowledge contained in these boiled-down pamphlets amounts to little more than a residue. They contain little or nothing that would not be known already, and omit everything that falls between the gaps they create. Pop music is a music of the gaps, bubbling up from and spilling into every crevice it finds. So what is needed is an encyclopaedia of the gaps, an encyclopaedia containing the knowledge and insight which both helps define the music it refers to, and which is increasingly left out of the corporatised canon of the Ultimate and Definitive and Greatest handbooks of pop music.

And this is the Encyclopædia Musica. What you really need to know about pop music will be found in here.

Publication of the Encyclopaedia began on the 26th March 2001. The Encyclopaedia is published as a part-work in the signatures of Usenet articles. Following accepted Internet standards, therefore, each entry in the Encyclopaedia is a maximum of four 72-character lines long.