One thing that I have hardly looked into is the section "Label, Company, Catalog Number, Etc." or "LCCN" in Discogs lingo (although it is only called that in the data entry form, on regular pages it says "Companies, etc.").
In this section information such as the label, record company, distributor and much more should be entered. But of course, this often doesn't happen, partially also because people don't know what to enter.
I believe that with a little bit of data mining it should be possible to find at least some of the data. I already showed that it works for depósito legal values so why shouldn't it for others?
Let's look at an example from, again, Spain, namely this release on the Pye label. On the rear sleeve the following can be seen:
Looking at the label page for Discos Belter:
"Discos Belter, S.A. also offered distribution services and was a licensee for Motown, Pye Records, Salsoul Records, Prelude Records, etc."
As the data was not initially on the release page I thought this might be a pattern, where the distribution company is missing for certain labels that didn't do their own distribution, like Pye.
So what I did is to look at all of the Spanish the releases on the Pye label, see how many of these don't have a distribution company declared and that also have images so the data can be verified to see if there actually is one on the image.
I found 160 releases for which there was no distribution company defined. Of these 8 had references to Discos Belter. Of these 5 had it listed as "record company" (not sure if this is correct, as it is only listed as the distributor), and 3 had a reference to it in the "Notes" section.
Of the 152 releases there was just a single image for 54 of them, so I ignored those. Quite a few were not distributed by Discos Belter, but Hispavox, RCA and others so it is clear Pye must have switched distributors a few times.
The resulting releases are a bit of a mixed bag, but for most of them I could change or improve something. Each time Pye changed distributors or manufacturers the label changed (wordings, information). For example what I could add or correct:
In this section information such as the label, record company, distributor and much more should be entered. But of course, this often doesn't happen, partially also because people don't know what to enter.
I believe that with a little bit of data mining it should be possible to find at least some of the data. I already showed that it works for depósito legal values so why shouldn't it for others?
Let's look at an example from, again, Spain, namely this release on the Pye label. On the rear sleeve the following can be seen:
Looking at the label page for Discos Belter:
"Discos Belter, S.A. also offered distribution services and was a licensee for Motown, Pye Records, Salsoul Records, Prelude Records, etc."
As the data was not initially on the release page I thought this might be a pattern, where the distribution company is missing for certain labels that didn't do their own distribution, like Pye.
So what I did is to look at all of the Spanish the releases on the Pye label, see how many of these don't have a distribution company declared and that also have images so the data can be verified to see if there actually is one on the image.
I found 160 releases for which there was no distribution company defined. Of these 8 had references to Discos Belter. Of these 5 had it listed as "record company" (not sure if this is correct, as it is only listed as the distributor), and 3 had a reference to it in the "Notes" section.
Of the 152 releases there was just a single image for 54 of them, so I ignored those. Quite a few were not distributed by Discos Belter, but Hispavox, RCA and others so it is clear Pye must have switched distributors a few times.
The resulting releases are a bit of a mixed bag, but for most of them I could change or improve something. Each time Pye changed distributors or manufacturers the label changed (wordings, information). For example what I could add or correct:
- add the "licensed from" field for releases made by Ariola Eurodisc or releases distributed by Discos Belter
- add "distributed by" for the releases distributed by Discos Belter
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