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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.
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