What happened in Discogs in May 2018?

Another month, so another round of statistics. This time Discogs was fairly quick to release a new data dump, unlike last month. If you don't know how this works it is best to first read that overview, plus perhaps a few older ones.

Release statistics

The latest dump (which I call "the June dump", as it was released then) covers all data added from ~~May 1~~May 15 - May 31 2018 (inclusive). The previous dump had 9,843,513 releases, the new dump has 9,906,032 releases. That means 62,519 releases more in the database. Of those:

9,520,889 releases stayed the same
320,855 releases were changed
64,288 releases were added
1,769 releases were removed from the database
365 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

What strikes me is that the amount of releases is a lot less than last time, although then it was a lot more. So I guess that last month's dump was actually covering part of May as well (which the file name seems to suggest as well, but I missed it last time, fixed now).

The changes in the dataset are, again, surprisingly similar to the last time: most changes are in the oldest releases and the most recent releases.

Releases in Discogs that were changed in May 2018

Smells

Because this datadump is about fewer new data (half a month) than a regular dump there are fewer new smells: 901 releases with almost 1200 errors, when ignoring tracklist errors and artist errors. There are a handful of SPARS code errors (about 40), around 500 label code errors, and so on. It is very very predictable.

Because it is so predictable it feels to me like there is a lot more automation possible. Come on Discogs, you can do a lot better than this!

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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