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Releases under a Creative Commons license in Discogs (part 1)

While digging through releases in Discogs I spotted that some of them had a reference to a Creative Commons license. As I am dealing with open source licensing (of software) on a daily basis it of course immediately drew my attention and I started to wonder how many of the releases in the Discogs database have a reference to Creative Commons.

I (again) grabbed the latest data dump from Discogs (which itself is under a CC0 license, so quite fitting), and adapted my scripts to report if there were any references to Creative Commons in either the free text fields, the notes or in some of the descriptions in the "Barcode and Other Identifiers" (BaOI) sections and found 7884 releases. I plotted the results of the release numbers, which you can see below (first bar: release number 1 - 999,999, second bar release number 1,000,000 - 1,999,999, and so on):

Distribution of possibly CC-licensed works in the Discogs database
What strikes me is that for older releases there are quite a few references to Creative Commons, but that is not the case for more recent releases. One can only guess why that is: perhaps there were a few people who very actively added Creative Commons releases to Discogs and then stopped. Or, perhaps people started to use abbreviations for the licenses, which I didn't check for (this is still on my list of things to check).

I did not yet check how many of the releases were physical, or merely digital, and I also did not check which licenses were actually used the most (both questions on my list of future research).
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