Which SPARS code is most used in Discogs?

I haven't looked at SPARS codes for a while but I thought it would be interesting to see which SPARS code is used the most. If you haven't read my previous articles about SPARS codes I suggest you do that first.

What I wondered is: how often is each SPARS code used on a release? I looked at the releases where I have verified that there is a valid SPARS code. There are more releases with SPARS codes in Discogs, but a lot of releases (at least 24,000) still need to be fixed at the time of writing and these haven't been looked at.

In total I looked at 113,975 releases from data up to October 31 2019. The breakdown:

DDD: 52,082 releases
AAD: 33,821 releases
ADD: 28,564 releases
DAD: 480 releases
AAA: 120 releases
DDA: 87 releases
ADA: 15 releases
DAA: 12 releases

If you add these numbers you will get more than 113,975. This is because some releases have more than one SPARS code as the mix can actually be different per track. What is clear is that the "regular" SPARS codes (AAD, ADD, DDD) are the most prominent, and the more exotic ones are, well, exotic!

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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...

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