Skip to main content

What happened in Discogs in July 2018?

I have some catch up to do with the data of last year, so I will try to keep it short and sweet. If you are new to these posts, what I do is that each month I compare the Discogs data dump with the data dump from the month before and see where things have changed, and also run a few sanity checks on the data to find if I can spot any obvious (or less obvious) mistakes. As an example, check out the previous post and then work your way back through history.

Release statistics

The dump with all the changes from July 1 - July 31 2018 has 10,116,749 releases. The previous dump had 10,010,587 releases, so that means 106,162 releases more. Of those:
  • 9,510,902 releases stayed the same
  • 497,113 releases were changed
  • 108,734 releases were added
  • 2,572 releases were removed from the database
  • 329 releases had status Draft, Deleted or Rejected
  • 11 releases that were not Accepted were in both dumps
  • 3 releases were moved from Draft to Accepted
Changes are, again, very similar as in months before, although the bars seem to a bit lower:

Smells

Ignoring artist and tracklisting errors there a just a few more obvious errors than in the previous month: 2172 errors, half of which are related to label codes (as expected). Then there are 120 for depósito legal, 478 for SID code errors, 140 ISRC code errors, 181 Rights Society errors, 87 SPARS code errors and then 73 other errors. All in all it is very similar to previous months.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
1 comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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:...
Post a Comment
Read more