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Label Code (part 2)

One thing that I wondered about is: how many people can get the label code wrong? The label code is very simple: the letters LC (uppercase or lowercase), possibly followed by whitespace, a colon, a dash, etc. and then 4 to 6 digits. Label codes with 6 digits are still extremely rare but will start to pop up as soon as there are no more 5 digit label codes (the official website is at just over 78,000 now).

Many of the label codes are prefixed with zeroes to fill the number to 4 or 5 digits, for example: LC00123.

Since 0 (zero) is easy to confuse with O (capital o) I wondered how many entries that likely are a valid label code use O (capital o) instead of 0 (zero). I took the October 2017 dump and searched for Label Code fields where the value started with LC or lc, and contained O (capital o). I found 131 unique releases with in total 133 Label Code fields, which is actually surprisingly low.

Of these a few were also:
  • non-compliant label codes, for example this release (revision 8) on KODEX, but also others: 6 releases
  • other (comments following the label code, etc.): 5 releases
  • NONE: 1 release
  • LCCODE (followed by a number): 5 releases
  • LC NO (followed by a number): 1 release
so 113 releases, although there are a few releases where it is actually not clear if it is an accidental error or intentional. Look at for example the pictures of this release: it clearly seems to say LCO instead of LC0 but I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually an error on the part of the designer, as the official label code website says it should be 05064, not O5064. So here two worlds clash, which confused a friend who verified the entries for me: Discogs rules say "as on the release", but the official label code site is clearly showing it is wrong. For datamining purposes it is also better to have the correct code. My advise (but probably many people on Discogs will disagree with me) would be: fix it and leave a note in the free text field that it was an error on the release.

The data never ceases to amaze me as there are always a few surprises lurking.
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