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Release with artists not in the Discogs database (part 1)

When adding a new artist to Discog and the artist is unknown it is normally added to the database and the release is added to the artist page. Artist actually is a bit of a misnomer, as it could also mean a sound engineer, a producer, and so on. For each of the "artists" there is a number in the database and a corresponding artist page.

I was looking through some of the entries in Discogs and spotted a few instances where the number of the artist was 0 and on the release page there was no link to an artist page.

The credits list on the Discogs website explains that there are five credits for which the artist is not recorded in the database and there is no artist page. Personally I don't see the need for three of these ("artwork by", "photography" and "executive producer") and think they should be completely replaced by linked credits.

I was wondering how many releases there actually are where one or more "artists" were not linked, as I had spotted a few instances where it likely made sense to use a linked credit. There were quite a few more than I had expected: 256,816 releases. They are distributed as follows:


Releases in the Discogs database with artists not in the database
As there are many more older releases with non-linked credits I would not be surprised if a lot of these should actually be linked credits, but the old data simply was never converted.

I did not yet look at which credits have non-linked credits and if it is indeed limited to just the five credits from the credits list. That's something for another day.
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