Indian PKD codes in Discogs

Some countries require that music releases have certain identifiers on them. A well known example is the depósito legal identifier in Spain that I wrote about  several times before.

But other countries have it similar things as well. One of them is India, which for new releases requires a so called "PKD". This code contains the month and year in which the release was made, or at least when it was packed (I have seen it being talked about as both a production date, as well as a packaging date). One of my friends at Discogs (gerjolp) looked into these codes a bit, but could not find many references, just a few forum threads and the exact meaning remains a bit unclear, also because sometimes the date seems to have been stamped instead of printed, and this is not clear from the data in the database.

PKD codes in Discogs

There are 132 releases from India in the latest Discogs dump where it is easy to find the PKD code in BaOI. There are likely many more releases in Discogs where this code should have been added, but was not.

There are two checks that I implemented in my scripts:

1. absence of a year in the release
2. wrong year of the release (because earlier than the year in the PKD code)

There were 13 releases where something was wrong. For 9 there was a wrong year, and in most cases it turned out that someone had a repress and added the information of the repress (sometimes including pictures) to the original version, even though it should have been submitted as a separate release. For 4 releases no date was given or an earlier date had been removed as there was uncertainty about them.

As can be seen there is actually too little data to say something useful. My guess is that in perhaps a year (after more releases from India have been added) this might have changed, and I might revisit the topic then.