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What happened in Discogs in February 2018?

It is a new month, so that means that there is a new dumpfile available that I can do analysis on. If this is the first time you see one of these posts I would highly recommend to first read a similar post from last month.

Release statistics

The latest dump ("the March dump") contains data from February 1 - February 28 (inclusive).  The previous dump had 9,442,719 releases, the new dump has  9,554,069 releases. That means 111,350 releases more in the database.
  • 3,391,491 releases stayed the same
  • 6,048,861 releases were changed
  • 113,717 releases were added
  • 2,367 releases were removed from the database
  • 209 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
So, looking at the releases that were changed it is obvious: Discogs changed the dump format again! ARGH! This time it is in the "joiners" for the artist names. Discogs changing the internal XML format makes it so hard to compare months without doing a significant amount of extra work. Bah.

I wanted to show interesting pictures, but not this time, sorry.

Smells

Regarding smells: with the latest version of my checking scripts I found 5854 releases added in February 2018 with possible smells. When ignoring tracklist errors (the most common 'bug' in the data) then it drops to 1657 releases. Quite a few of the remaining errors are related to (in this order) wrong label codes, SID codes, rights societies, SPARS codes, ISRC codes and depósito legal.
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