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ASIN field in Discogs (part 1)

What I like about Discogs is that I keep learning about things I never knew about. One field in Discogs that I didn't know about is the ASIN field. The Discogs guidelines describe it as:

"This is a unique identification number assigned by Amazon.com and its partners for product identification within the Amazon.com organization."

and apparently it is embedded in product URLs at Amazon. Many people seem to have extracted this number from the product URLs, despite the guidelines saying:

"This number should only be applied to releases manufactured by Amazon (CD-Rs), physical releases exclusive to Amazon, and digital files sold by Amazon."

as there were more than 42,000 ASIN entries in the Discogs database on October 31 2017. I would be extremely surprised if there were that many Amazon exclusives.

ASIN in Discogs

According to the Wikipedia page about ASIN the identifier is a ten character identifier. A bit of mining revealed:
  • most, if not all, ASIN values recorded in the database start with B
  • some people have added extra data indicating whether the ASIN is from Amazon in Japan, France, Germany or the United Kingdom
I took the dumbest approach possible: check if the length of the ASIN field (if defined) is 10 characters, after correcting for any country specific markers and extra whitespace.

In total 1291 errors were found. There likely are a few false positives, are valid ASIN codes, where people omitted the character B at the beginning. For the rest it is a mixed bag: rights societies, depósito legal, matrix, and other random things can all be found. The checks have been added to my scripts and the release numbers will (likely) soon be posted onto the Discogs database forum.

Next time: verifying if the ASIN values are actually valid on Amazon.

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