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.

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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