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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:

  1. unknown -> US: 454
  2. Germany -> Europe: 319
  3. UK & Europe -> Europe: 217
  4. unknown -> UK: 178
  5. UK -> Europe: 149
  6. Netherlands -> Europe: 147
  7. unknown -> Europe: 139
  8. unknown -> Germany: 120
  9. UK -> US: 118
  10. Europe -> Germany: 84
  11. US -> UK: 79
  12. USA & Canada -> US: 76
  13. US -> Canada: 65
  14. unknown -> France: 64
  15. UK -> UK & Europe: 62
  16. UK & Europe -> UK: 51
  17. France -> Europe: 51
  18. Saudi Arabia -> United Arab Emirates: 49
  19. US -> Europe: 46
  20. 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:
  • India -> Netherlands: 1
  • India -> Germany: 1
  • Japan -> Israel: 1
  • Malaysia -> South Africa: 1
What is also interesting to note is that Discogs itself is a bit inconsistent in spelling (US and USA).

The releases are distributed in the database as follows:



It seems that old releases are not changed as much, although still a bit more than I had expected. I am wondering why this is. Perhaps it is because releases are merged and different data is used? Or are there genuine errors? Or have releases been hijacked (images replaced with that of another release)? One release that was changed had actually been in Discogs for over 18 years and it appears to be a genuine mistake.
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