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Barcodes (part 4)

Continuing with my research into barcodes in the Discogs database: which barcodes appear most often? If you haven't already I would recommend reading part 1, part 2 and part 3 of this series first.

One thing that I was wondering about is which barcodes are found the most. The top 10 values for the barcode field looks like this:
  1. 1411: 4820011260011
  2. 1252: 4 820011 260011 >
  3. 827: 6456489431561
  4. 826: 6 456489 431561
  5. 460: 4 64043 51662 9
  6. 455: 464043516629
  7. 447: 4 60980-06754 5
  8. 437: 4 619497 411525
  9. 429: 4619497411525
  10. 427: 460980067545
Because one release could have multiple barcode fields (frequently one for the text representation and one for the scanned version) there is some overlap and the top 10 is actually just 5 different barcodes.

I was wondering which release was at number one and to my surprise it was a release by Dissection. To my knowledge the majority of the people on Discogs are not into extreme metal, so I looked a bit further at what other releases have this barcode: Judas Priest, Depeche Mode, Jimi Hendrix, ...

OK, something is going on here. Deeper inspection reveals that these are all releases that are coming from Ukraine and are unofficial pirate pressings. So there is a bootlegger in Ukraine pressing CDs and using the same barcode for all releases. That should definitely make it easier to block on the Discogs marketplace, because right now (as I am writing, expecting this to change soon) it seems only half of them are.

Then the next barcode (3 and 4 in the top 10): pirate pressings from Russia. Barcodes 5/6: pirate pressings from Russia. Barcodes 7/10: pirate pressings from Russia. Barcodes 8/9: pirate pressings from Russia. Hm. For these pressings the barcode really isn't helpful to distinguish between different releases.

I scrolled a bit further down the list to find a barcode that was not for pirate pressings (many are), but where there were still quite a few releases as those are likely interesting. I expected to find them for the big artists, but more in the range of 40 or 50 releases. I actually found something a lot more interesting.

If you search for the barcode 016026205218 you will find many releases (500+) and they are definitely not (all) pirates. At first I thought this was mostly more "copy to draft" sloppiness where people used another release as a template but upon closer inspection it turns out the barcode actually is on different releases. You can see for yourself by looking at this release and comparing it with this other release.

It got even stranger when seeing that it is used on CD, vinyl and cassette, across many labels and genres, and on official and unofficial releases. So what happened here? Was this particular barcode a standard code in Italy on all releases? It is very puzzling. What is sure is that, like the pirate releases, the barcode is completely useless for these (mostly) Italian releases.

In the next part I will dive into something else related to barcodes in Dicsogs, although I am not yet sure what.
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