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Rights Society fields in the Discogs database (part 1)

One of the fields in the "Barcode and Other Identifiers" section of a release in Discogs is the Rights Society field. These societies are for things like collecting royalties for artists, although I have no idea how they exactly work (and, to be honest, I am not that interested in knowing at the moment). Examples of rights societies are ASCAP, GEMA, BUMA, SGAE and more.

The Rights Society field has been around in Discogs for some time, but still quite a few errors are being made. For example, I often see the Other field being used, but also ISRC, Barcode and other fields.

A while ago I added support for detecting these to my scripts, and recently refined detection so I could write this blog with some more accurate information.

Rights Society errors

In the latest Discogs data dump you will find about 30,000 releases where the Rights Society field is not used where it possibly should have been used. This excludes instances of where the value is actually not a rights society, which also tends to happen (this is future research).

The releases with known errors are distributed across the data as follows:

Distribution of Rights Society field errors in the Discogs data
 What is immediately obvious is that there is a big spike and then the problem almost seems to disappear. My guess is that this happened around the time when the Rights Society field was introduced and people actively started using it.

ISRC fields used for Rights Society

One interesting find is that I sometimes saw that the ISRC field was used when Rights Society should be used. The reason is very obvious if you edit a release: ISRC is the option right above Rights Society in the drop down box and people just chose the wrong option, without checking before they submitted their release to the database. This doesn't happen very often: 31 times (although I am sure that I missed a few entries, and I will revisit this in a future post).

ISRC fields used when Rights Society should have been used
The distribution of fields also shows a recent spike: this is when the ISRC field was introduced. The older ones are releases where data was later added and the wrong field was used.

Barcode fields used for Rights Society

Finally I looked at how often Barcode is used when Rights Society should have been used. There are two reasons for this:
  1. Barcode is the default setting when adding a new entry in "Barcodes and Other Identifiers"
  2. Barcode is the setting below Rights Society in the drop down box for "Barcodes and Other Identifiers"
meaning that there are two opportunities for people to make a mistake. Here it is a bit over 400 releases that are wrong.

Barcode fields used when Rights Society should have been used
What is striking is that here the distribution of the error across the dataset is a lot more uniform.

What is interesting to see is that there are three different errors, with three completely different distributions across the data. In a future blogpost I will focus a bit more on the content of Rights Society fields. I already know that it has been used for label codes, but there are probably more errors.
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