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Fixing wrong credits in Discogs (part 1)

For releases in Discogs it is customary that people add the credits for a release, like who wrote songs, produced the record, mastered the recording, and so on. In some cases this information can be important, as some reissues or versions of records have been mastered by different people (I don't have an example, but I remember bumping into this while browsing through releases).

Discogs has published a list of credits and roles that can be used in the database. These are the only ones that should be used and when editing a release that has a different role an error saying that something "does not match the credit list" (or similar to that) will be shown and you are expected to fix it first. Since a friend saw this error very frequently it got me wondering how many releases in Discogs there are with a credit that is not on the official credit list.

For my clean up scripts I created a script to extract the credits list (so I wouldn't need to hardcode it), added a few checks for incorrect credits and processed the latest data dump. The results: 121,010 incorrect credit roles were found in 52,957 releases.

Distribution of incorrect credit roles over releases in the Discogs database
It is clear that especially for older releases there are many wrong roles. Looking at the data it seems that the credit role error checking only came into effect around release number 10,533,000. This would explain the fact that the last bar in the chart is only about half of the size of the second to last bar. The sharp decrease around release 4,000,000 suggests that something happened there as well, but it is not immediately clear and likely will involve digging through the Discogs forums or technical release notes.

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