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ISRC codes in Discogs (part 1)

One thing that I had never heard about is the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC). According to the Wikipedia page about ISRC (worth reading) it is actually already almost 30 years old.

These codes are interesting for datamining for a few reasons:
  1. the year in which the code was assigned is embedded in it, even though there are some exceptions: apparently in early days the recording year was used.
  2. they are specific to a single recording
These two characteristics make it an ideal piece of data for checks and comparisons.

Sometimes the ISRC code is printed on releases, but sometimes also embedded in some of the metadata on CDs. I never knew about ISRC, as I don't have releases with the code (or at least, I never paid attention) and I never have had a (standalone) CD-player that displayed these codes by default.

ISRC in Discogs

The ISRC field is a relative new addition to the Barcode and Other Identifers (BaOI) section. In retrospect it might have been better to not put them in BaOI, but with each individual track as each ISRC code is specific to a single recording and not to a release. This would also have made it a lot easier to do all kinds of cross-correlation between releases. But, I guess that with some scripting this can fairly easily be worked around.

When looking at fields with ISRC fields I basically had four questions, the first two of which I will answer in this post:
  1. how many fields with ISRC codes exist, but don't use the ISRC field from BaOI?
  2. how many ISRC fields exist which have data that does not conform to the ISRC standard?
  3. how many releases use the wrong date?
  4. how many recordings exist that use the same ISRC code, but are different recordings (indicating either a duplicate ISRC code, or a typing error of the submitter)?

Missing ISRC fields

There are many releases in Discogs where there are one or multiple ISRC codes, but no ISRC field is used. As usual I added the checks to my scripts and processed the latest data dump.

I found 150,800 fields with ISRC codes (tagged as such in the description field, I did not check the actual contents) in 55,507 releases, where the field is not ISRC. In the dataset they are distributed as follows (by release number, first bar means 1 - 999,999, second bar 1,000,000 - 1,999,999, and so on).

ISRC tagged fields in BaOI that aren't ISRC fields
There are 55,507 releases in Discogs where the ISRC field is not used, but should be.
This means that there is quite some fixing to be done for ISRC codes!

Existing ISRC fields

There are 12718 releases that have the ISRC field set, with 30464 ISRC fields in total. They are divided across the dataset as follows:

ISRC fields found in the Discogs database

Of these 441 releases have one or more fields possibly wrong, totalling 539 fields.


ISRC fields with possibly incorrect data

The peak in possibly incorrect ISRC fields of release number 10,000,000 and higher is expected, but there is an absence in the range 3,000,000 - 3,999,999 which based on the ISRC fields found might be expected.

It should be noted that some of these (mainly Finnish releases) have a code that instead of one ISRC for a single track contain a range of ISRC codes for multiple tracks and my scripts currently do not take that into account (which is on my TODO list). How these ISRC range codes should be expanded is (at the moment) still unclear to me.

Other notable exceptions are Chinese releases, where some extra data seems to have been appended to the ISRC, and French releases, where labels apparently have some ISRC code. This was discussed in the Discogs forums a few months ago.

In the near future I will dig into ISRC codes a bit more, plus play with some programs to extract ISRC codes from my own CDs.
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