ISRC codes in Discogs (part 8)

A bit over a year ago I looked into ISRC codes for checking release dates. The ISRC code actually contains a year component which can be used to check dates, as (except in rare old cases) the release is always after the ISRC code has been assigned, so it cannot be earlier. A few people on Discogs seem to disagree, but meh. For more details you can read an earlier post.

So back in February 2018 I got the following graph:

Distribution of smells in releases with known ISRC fields in February 2018

which also included some other smells and not just date mismatches. Back then I concluded that there were 273 releases that had a date mismatch. So I decided to rerun my analysis with the latest data dump (up until and including April 30 2019) now that it seems that there are many more ISRC codes in the database, because people seem to be fixing the ISRC field.

As expected the amount of releases with a date mismatch is now a lot higher: 1414. They are distributed across the database as follows:

Distribution of wrong dates in releases with known ISRC fields in May 2019

The bar charts cannot be compared (as the first bar chart also compares some other smells), but what is clear is that there are significantly more releases where the release date and the date component of the ISRC don't match. The upside is that it is now a bit easier to detect. I have not yet thought how this can be tackled best.

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

Search This Blog