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SID codes (part 3)

And again it is time to dive into the world of SID codes. Before reading this post it is advised to read part 1 and part 2.

Before I used Discogs I had not heard of SID codes and never realized that they can (somewhat) be used help date a release, as SID codes were only introduced in 1994.

I found out by accident when I was browsing through Discogs and found this release that I have had for many years. I bought it back in 1994 or 1995 and always wondered why it showed up in the shop (new) then even though it had supposedly been available already a number of years before. This year I found out  after learning about SID codes that my copy is a later repress.

This made me wonder: how many releases in the Discogs database are there that have some SID code defined, but have the year set to something earlier than 1994?

I added a check to my scripts and analyzed the latest available Discogs data dump (with data until November 1 2017) and found 3092 releases with a release date earlier than 1994 that had SID codes. These are distributed across the data as follows:

Releases in Discogs with SID codes and release date < 1994

There could be a few explanations for this:
  1. people have added releases that are actually represses, but aren't aware of it.
  2. people added variants to existing releases, not being aware that the variant they added should actually be a separate submission (because it is a repress)
Whatever it is, fixing it will be hard because, as said in an earlier post: very few people include pictures of the CDs where the SID codes are visible.
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