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.

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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