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What happened in Discogs in January 2018?

A new month, so Discogs uploaded a new datadump that I could analyze. Before reading this blogpost it might be good to first read the one about last month's datadump.

Release statistics

The latest dump ("the February dump") contains data from January 1 - January 31 (inclusive).  The previous dump had 9,324,867 releases, the new dump has 9,442,719 releases. That means 117,852 releases more in the database which seems to be a bit more than in previous months.
  • 8,776,440 releases stayed the same
  • 545,810 releases were changed
  • 120,469 releases were added
  • 2,617 releases were removed from the database
  • 179 releases had status Draft, Deleted or Rejected
  • 11 releases that were not Accepted were in both dumps
  • 1 release was moved from Draft to Accepted
All in all it looks like a very typical month in Discogs.

Smells

When looking at absolute numbers of releases for which I have identified a possible smell there is good news: 1,236 releases with possible known smells less but there are still many releases with known smells:

Distribution of known smells in January 2018

Dstribution of known smells in January 2018 (ignoring tracklisting errors)

In January 2018 a bit over 6,400 releases with possible known smells were added, and a bit over 1,750 if incorrect tracklistings are ignored.

Errors for for example SPARS codes and the Spanish depósito legal decreased with a few hundred each. So, it is very very slowly getting better and decreasing even though new releases are being added which is hopeful for the future, although there is still a very long way to go.
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