Having worked as a college DJ at WXPN in Philadelphia, he started reviewing records for Op magazine in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, Unterberger was an editor for Option.

Since 1993, he has been a prolific contributor to allmusic, the on-line database of music biographies and album reviews for which he has written thousands of entries. (Many of Unterberger's on-line contributions have also found their way into the print versions of Allmusics.) Unterberger contributes to various local and national publications, including Mojo, Record Collector, Rolling Stone, Oxford American, and No Depression. He has written liner notes to dozens of CD reissues for labels like Rhino, Collectors' Choice, and Sundazed.

Unterberger's books draw extensively upon first-hand interviews Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll Interviews at www.richieunterberger.com Music USA at www.richieunterberger.com Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers Interviews at www.richieunterberger.com 1960s Folk-Rock Interviews at www.richieunterberger.com with musicians and their associates.

Travel writing; public speaking

Unterberger has given numerous talks on music and popular culture at public libraries throughout San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Mateo County, California. He is also a speaker at area bookstores, including The Booksmith in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

Unterberger has also written on travel, including The Rough Guide to Seattle (1998); and is co-author of The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience (2007), a book about ethical products, investment, and related topics. He has traveled to more than thirty countries, and is an advocate of independent travel and alternative culture.

Family

His nephew, Andrew, formerly wrote for Stylusmagazine.com, and in 2007 was part of the winning team on VH1's World Series of Pop Culture.

His books include:

• 1998: Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll. Profiles of 60 under-appreciated cult rock artists of all styles and eras
• 1999: The Rough Guide to Music USA. A guidebook to the evolution of regional popular music throughout America in the twentieth century
• 2000: Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: overlooked innovators and eccentric visionaries of '60s Rock. Another look at under-appreciated cult rock artists
• 2002: Turn! Turn! Turn!: the '60s Folk-Rock revolution. The first part of a history of folk rock
• 2003: Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock. The second part of the author's history of folk rock
• 2006: The Unreleased Beatles: music and film. An illustrated 400-page guide to the music the Beatles recorded but did not release, as well as musical footage of the group that hasn't been made commercially available. The Unreleased Beatles won a 2007 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.
• 2009: White Light/White Heat: the Velvet Underground day-by-day