Rights Society fields in the Discogs database (part 2)

The Rights Society field in Discogs is a big potential source of issues. The reason is: almost all releases out there have one, or more, rights societies printed on them. I already looked into where the Rights Society field perhaps should have been used, but wasn't.

What I didn't look at is whether or not the values of the releases that have one or more Rights Society fields are actually correct.

I took the latest data dump and ran some tests. I haven't added the check to my scripts because there were too many false positives (although I will add a few sanity checks soon), but I still found a few interesting things.

BIEM

One rights society (at least according to the list of rights societies on Discogs, as it appears to be more of an umbrella organization) is BIEM. Some misspellings that I found:

BOEM: 2 times
BEIM: 122 times (although for at least one release it is printed like that on the disc)
BIME: 2 times
BIEN: 82 times

STEMRA

Another rights society is STEMRA. Some misspellings that I found:

STREMA: 28 times
STERMA: 98 times
STEMA: 32 times
STEMPRA: 22 times
STEMPA: 19 times
STEMBRA: 4 times
STEMERA: 3 times
STEMTA: 3 times
STEMRS: 3 times
STEMMA: 2 times
STEMRE: 1 time
STEMRO: 1 time
STEMPIA: 1 time
STEMTRA: 1 time

JASRAC

JASRAC is a rights society in Japan. A few misspellings I found there:

JASPAC: 23 times
JASDAC: 14 times
JASARC: 11 times
JASMAC: 10 times
JASNAC: 6 times
JASRAK: 5 times
JASRC: 4 times
JASRAQ: 3 times
JASARAC: 3 times
JASCRAC: 3 times
JARAC: 13 times
JSARAC: 5 times

and that is just a small selection. It's not a lot of releases, but almost all of these errors are completely preventable with a few extra checks or warnings when entering the data.

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SID codes (part 1)

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One thing I wondered about: for how many releases is the country field changed? I looked at the two most recent data dumps (covering February and March 2019) and see where they differed. In total 5274 releases "moved". The top 20 moves are: unknown -> US: 454 Germany -> Europe: 319 UK & Europe -> Europe: 217 unknown -> UK: 178 UK -> Europe: 149 Netherlands -> Europe: 147 unknown -> Europe: 139 unknown -> Germany: 120 UK -> US: 118 Europe -> Germany: 84 US -> UK: 79 USA & Canada -> US: 76 US -> Canada: 65 unknown -> France: 64 UK -> UK & Europe: 62 UK & Europe -> UK: 51 France -> Europe: 51 Saudi Arabia -> United Arab Emirates: 49 US -> Europe: 46 unknown -> Japan: 45 When you think about it these all make sense (there was a big consolidation in Europe in the 1980s and releases for multiple countries were made in a single pressing plant) but there are also a few weird changes:

Vinyl & Data

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