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What happened in a year of Discogs?

If you are reading this, then you are probably aware of the blog posts where I dig into what happened in Discogs in a particular month. If not, please read a few of the blog posts first.

As I saw a few patterns emerge I wanted to know if I would be seeing the same patterns if I would look at the data for an entire year, or if it would be different. So I took the data dumps covering March 2018 and March 2019 and I compared them. Originally I wanted to use data from 2018 only, but since the XML dump format changed a few times I could not without a lot of extra work.

Release statistics

At the end of March 2018 there were 9,680,263 releases, at the end of March 2019 there were 11,019,051 releases, meaning an increase of 1,338,788 releases.
  • 22,089 releases were removed
  • 1,360,877 releases were added
  • 6,250,678 releases stayed the same
  • 3,407,496 releases were changed
So that means that quite a few releases have not been changed. This immediately makes me wonder: are these releases that almost no one has any interest in? Are these releases that are complete enough and don't need change?

When plotting the changes (only looking at files that were already there in March 2018) it looks like this:



and although the bars are a bit closer to eachother most of the changes over the last year were for the older releases.
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