Skip to main content

Using data to find out when EMI moved from Barcelona to Madrid

I am going to deviate from my usual path a bit, mostly to show the power of having a lot of (correct) data. At some point in the 1980s EMI moved its Spanish office from Barcelona to Madrid. I wanted to see if I could pinpoint when this happened.

According to the EMI-Odeon label page on Discogs there were a few addresses in/around Barcelona and one in Madrid. What I noticed when looking at labels of EMI releases is that at some point a few things in the label designs and on the sleeves changed:

  1. the region for the depósito legal
  2. the name of the company
  3. the address of the company
An example of a release with the old address is Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf" from 1982. An example of a release with the new address is Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" from 1993. So the change of address must have happened sometime between those two releases, but when exactly?

I took the data dump released in June 2019 as a basis, extracted all the Spanish releases and filtered the EMI and Harvest (a sublabel) releases with depósito legal values and then looked at the year component of the depósito legal.

The data has nearly 5500 EMI releases (excluding many of the sublabels like Harvest and Odeon), of which a bit over 1720 have a proper depósito legal field. I also looked at 200 Harvest releases. Although there still is quite a bit of work to be done filling in missing data, but I was still able to make a very good guess: EMI moved offices in June 1985. Update: this seems to be correct, as on May 16 1985 it was reported that EMI had bought Hispavox, which was based in Madrid and that the Hispavox infrastructure would be used.

Assuming that the depósito legal values are assigned incrementally and the releases were not delayed, then the latest release from the Barcelona office is (as far as I know) "Rock & Roll Circus" by Orquesta Mandragón. There could of course be later releases, but these are not in the database with a (valid) depósito legal field.

The first EMI releases with a depósito legal from Madrid that I could find are a compilation album named "Tarzan Boy" and Marillion's "Kayleigh". The first Harvest release I can find is The Scorpions' "World Wide Live" which was released in June 1985 and has a depósito legal very close to the "Tarzan Boy" compilation album. Of course, there could be earlier releases with a depósito legal from Madrid.

There are a few exceptions to the rule (as always). Releases on EMI Classics seem to have been released with a depósito legal from 1997 or 1998 (example 1, example 2) but these seem to be special productions for the Ediciones Altaya label. There were also some releases (example 1, example 2) for Editorial Planeta DeAgostini, S.A. and in 2008 the whole "Colección Queen" (which was released by some Spanish newspapers) was released with depósito legal numbers from Barcelona.

I found one other exception, with a depósito legal number from Madrid dating from before the move, namely a promo flexidisc (Casal/Duran Duran). I have no idea why this particular release was deposited in Madrid.

One very odd release with both a Barcelona and Madrid depósito legal number is a cassette version of Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" album from 1984: the sleeve has a depósito legal from Barcelona, the cassette has one from Madrid. Apart from that they are identical, so it is immediately clear that someone made a mistake. Given that the address on the sleeve is in Barcelona I would say that likely the one on the sleeve is the correct one.

Apart from those I can add some more patterns to my list of sanity checks for releases: EMI releases with a depósito legal from Barcelona later than 1985 are very likely a mistake as are EMI releases with a depósito legal from Madrid earlier than 1985.

Of course, there were data entry errors in the Discogs database which were fixed as much as possible.

Concluding: given enough data a lot of interesting information can be found.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
1 comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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:
Post a Comment
Read more