DMM records in Discogs

Somewhere in the 1980s records started to appear with the "DMM" (Direct Metal Mastering) method. The whole background about DMM is explained on Wikipedia much better than I could do, so I will just focus on DMM in Discogs.

In Discogs there is no special field to indicate that a record was made using DMM, so some people have used the free text field in the "Format" section for it. I looked at how often this happened: 571 times, which are distributed like this in the Discogs database:

Distribution of releases tagged DMM

This seems to be quite low as there should be many many more (especially the 1980s pop records). Of course, one explanation could be that it is actually not relevant information. I am not aware of records that were both pressed as DMM and non-DMM releases and where the only difference is that DMM was used (but I could be wrong).

One thing that I also looked at is how many release were in Discogs that have DMM in the free text field but which are not on vinyl: 6 releases. Of these:

1 CD (unclear if it is a mistake)
2 box sets with only vinyl records (so DMM is correct)
3 cassettes, 2 of which are pirates from Indonesia and where likely the cover of an LP with the DMM logo was used. The other is from East-Germany and it is unclear why it is tagged as DMM.

So as a check this is not very useful.

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Vinyl & Data

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