Richie Unterberger has been writing about little-known and well-known rock and popular music of all kinds for 20 years, expanding in recent times to travel and sociopolitical books as well. He is author of The Rough Guide to Music USA, a guidebook to the evolution of regional popular music styles throughout America in the twentieth century, and co-author of the travel guidebook The Rough Guide to Seattle. He is also co-author of The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience, a reference volume (published in early 2007) for buying and evaluating ethical products, socially responsible investing, green energy consumption, and other related topics.

Other music history books he has written include Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll, which profiled 60 underappreciated cult rock artists of all styles and eras, and its sequel, Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock. He is also author of a two-volume history of 1960s folk-rock, Turn! Turn! Turn!: The '60s Folk-Rock Revolution and Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock. His most recent music book, The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film (published in late 2006), is an exhaustive guide to the group's unissued recordings and film footage.

Since 1993, he has been a prolific contributor to the All Music Guide, the largest on-line database of music biographies and album reviews, for which he has written thousands of entries. He has also contributed travel and music pieces to various anthology books and publications, including MOJO, Record Collector, No Depression, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Rough Guide to Rock, 100 Albums That Changed Music, the East Bay Express, the Oxford American, the Daily Telegraph, and Perfect Sound Forever. He has written liner notes to more than one hundred CD reissues for the Collectors' Choice Music, Sundazed, Rhino, Water, 4 Men With Beards, Sunbeam, and Top Sail labels. He has traveled to more than thirty countries, and is a passionate advocate of independent travel and alternative culture in general. When not on the road, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he's resided for nearly twenty years.