What happened in Discogs in April 2018?

I actually had wanted to write this post a few weeks ago, but for some reasons it took Discogs a lot longer to publish the new data dump. I can only guess why, but I would not be surprised if GDPR had something to do with it. I then got swamped with other tasks so now, almost a month too late, I can finally tell you what happened in Discogs in April 2018. First of all, if this is the first time you read one of these posts, please read the one from last month first.

Release statistics

The latest dump (which I call the "May dump") covers the period of April 1 - ~~April 30~~ May 14 2018 (inclusive). The previous dump had 9,680,263 releases, the new dump has 9,843,513 releases. That means 163,250 releases more in the database. Of these:

8,983,224 releases stayed the same
693,583 releases were changed
166,706 releases were added
3,456 releases were removed from the database
162 releases had status Draft, Deleted or Rejected
11 releases that were not Accepted were in both dumps
0 releases were moved from Draft to Accepted

Like last time I wanted to know where the changes in the dataset are. I looked at the numbers of the releases that were changed and plotted them.

Releases in Discogs that were changed in April 2018

What is striking is that it is almost the same as last month, except that there are more changes for the latest releases. But the majority of changes is still in the very first releases!

Smells

There are a few more errors than before, but that is also because my scripts keep catching more and more. When ignoring Tracklisting errors (by far the most common error in Discogs) and artist errors (when an artist is not in the database, which could, or could not be an actual error) then there are about 2,400 releases with about 3,400 errors. The distribution of these errors is pretty standard: around 100 releases with some depósito legal error, around 140 SPARS code errors, about 1250 label code errors, and so on. It is almost exactly the same as last month.

In a few days there should be a new data dump from Discogs (unless it comes almost two weeks late like this time). I will try to process the results quicker next time!

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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