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.

Comments

SID codes (part 1)

One thing that I only learned about after using Discogs is the so called Source Identification Code, or SID. These codes were introduced in 1994 to combat piracy and to find out on which machines a CD was made. It was introduced by Philips and adopted by IFPI, and specifications are publicly available which clearly describe the two available SID codes (mastering SID code and mould SID code). Since quite a few months Discogs has two fields available in the " Barcode and Other Identifiers " (BaOI) section: Mould SID code Mastering SID code A few questions immediately popped up in my mind: how many releases don't have a SID field defined when there should be (for example, the free text field indicates it is a SID field)? how many releases have a SID field with values that should not be in the SID field? how many release have a SID field, but a wrong year (as SID codes were only introduced in 1994) how many vinyl releases have a SID code defined (which is impossi

SPARS codes (part 1)

Let's talk about SPARS codes used on CDs (or CD-like formats). You have most likely seen it used, but maybe don't know its name. The SPARS code is a three letter code indicating if recording, mixing and mastering were analogue or digital. For example they could look like the ones below. There is not a fixed format, so there are other variants as well. Personally I am not paying too much attention to these codes (I simply do not care), but in the classical music world if something was labeled as DDD (so everything digital) companies could ask premium prices. That makes it interesting information to mine and unlock, which is something that Discogs does not allow people to do when searching (yet!) even though it could be a helpful filter. I wanted to see if it can be used as an identifier to tell releases apart (are there similar releases where the only difference is the SPARS code?). SPARS code in Discogs Since a few months SPARS is a separate field in the Discogs

Country statistics (part 2)

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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