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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!


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