The Spin Alternative Record Guide is a music reference book compiled by the American music magazine Spin and published in 1995 by Vintage Books. It was edited by the rock critic Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks, who was the magazine's editor-in-chief at the time. The book has essays and reviews from a number of prominent critics on albums, artists and genres considered relevant to the alternative music movement. Contributors who were consulted for the guide include Ann Powers, Rob Sheffield, Simon Reynolds and Michael Azerrad.

The book did not sell particularly well and received a mixed reaction from reviewers in 1995. The quality and relevance of the contributors' writing were praised, while the editors' concept and comprehensiveness of alternative music were seen as ill-defined. Nonetheless, it inspired a number of future music critics and helped to revive the career of the folk artist John Fahey, whose music was covered in the guide.

Spanning 468 pages, the Spin Alternative Record Guide compiles essays by 64 music critics on recording artists and bands who either predated, were involved in, or had developed from alternative rock. Each artist's entry is accompanied by their discography, with albums rated with a score between one and ten. Unlike the third edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide (1992), which limited its discographies to albums currently in-print on CD, the Spin Alternative Record Guide offered more comprehensive album discographies. The entries are accompanied by album artwork.

The book's editors included contributions from noted journalists and critics such as Charles Aaron, Gina Arnold, Michael Azerrad, Byron Coley, Ann Powers, Simon Reynolds, Alex Ross, Rob Sheffield and Neil Strauss. Sheffield wrote the bulk of the guide's entries, while Powers "allowed her home to become command central on the book for many months". Though he did not contribute his own writing, Robert Christgau assisted in the creation of the guide by loaning out records from his personal collection as needed.

The contributors curated an overall "Top 100 Alternative Albums" list in an appendix, ranking the Ramones' 1976 self-titled debut album at number one. A few dozen personal top-ten record lists from contributors and musicians are interspersed throughout the book. The musicians who provided their own top-ten lists are Mark Arm, Lori Barbero, Lou Barlow, Kurt Bloch, King Coffey, Digable Planets (members Craig "Knowledge" Irving and Mariana "Ladybug" Vieira), Tanya Donelly, Greg Dulli, Gordon Gano, Greg Graffin, Kristin Hersh, Georgia Hubley, Calvin Johnson, Jon Langford, Courtney Love, Barbara Manning, Mac McCaughan, Buzz Osborne (listed as King Buzzo), Joey Ramone, Jim Reid, Lætitia Sadier, Sally Timms, Steve Turner and Josephine Wiggs.

Even by the standards of the time, the Spin Alternative Record Guide took an unusually inclusive approach to the boundaries of what "alternative" could mean. Before 1991, the genre "alternative rock" conventionally referred to post-punk and college rock. Within a few years, "alternative" had broadened into a catchall term for any rock bands outside the mainstream, regardless of their particular style — even as, paradoxically, "alternative" music became hugely popular and commercially successful. As a result, "alternative" was increasingly derided as a vague or even incoherent category.

As summarized by the scholar Gayle Wald, the book's introduction defined "alternative" rock as "an aesthetic that disavows, or evinces critical mistrust of, earlier rock subjectivities as well as the music industry itself". Rather than limiting its scope strictly within the musical genre of "rock" per se, the guide's coverage encompassed a wide range of non-rock artists who had adopted an anti-commercial stance or were aligned with a particular subculture. In an introductory essay titled "What Is Alternative Rock?", Weisbard explored the genre's origins and, more broadly, "alternative sensibilities" in other musical traditions. "Alternative rock lacks the proud boundaries that rock's original tradition kept so well guarded," he wrote:

More than jazz, blues, country, or any other musical genre, old-style rock was defined by a mass appeal you didn't have to sneer at, the mythic popularity of the universal youth music that turned the repressed fifties into the rebellious sixties ... Alternative rock, on the other hand, is still anti-generationally dystopian, subculturally presuming fragmentation; it's built on an often neurotic discomfort over massified culture, takes as its archetype bohemia far more than youth, and never expects that its popular appeal, such as it is, will have much of a social impact.