Vinyl & Data

Having looked through many releases in Discogs I often see that data is not entered as it is on the release. One example: rights societies are typeset in many different ways, where sometimes you will have an all uppper case name (for example: "BIEM"), sometimes there is spacing ("B I E M"), sometimes there are dots in the name ("B.I.E.M."), and so on. In the examples mentioned above the values are all basically referencing the same rights society so it is worth asking if the values entered on each release page should be "as written on release" or if they should be stored as the value of whatever it is pointing it? Said differently: should the release page focus on "syntax" (how it is written on the release) or "semantics" (what it means)? There are things to be said for both: there are releases where the person designing the sleeve or label made an error, for example: releases with "BIEN" instead of "BIEM...

One field in the "barcode and other identifiers" section in Discogs that is fairly new is the ISRC field. I have written about ISRC before, so you might want to read those posts first. Before there was a dedicated ISRC field the ISRC codes would be put into fields like "Other" or "Barcode" so I wondered: how well are these being updated and replaced by ISRC fields? I checked the dumps from the last 6 months: May 2019 dump: 22,391 releases June 2019 dump: 21,096 releases July 2019 dump: 19,214 releases August 2019 dump: 15,161 releases September 2019 dump: 13,390 releases October 2019 dump: 12,090 releases November 2019 dump: 11,360 releases December 2019 dump: 10,578 releases So in 8 months time the number of problematic releases has more than halved, while the amount of releases in the database with ISRC codes has increased. With a bit of luck all of these will have been fixed in the next half year. Impressive.

In some countries (especially in Spain) it was/is custom to translate titles of songs and print them on the sleeve (sometimes without the original title). The cool thing about this is that these releases have unique sleeves and labels. One example is Queen's "Hot Space", which was translated to " Espacio Caliente ". Frequently songs are also covered in a different language than the original and given a new title. From a collector point of view this could be interesting: there are actually people who collect covers of specific songs. The challenge is that if only the translated title is printed on the release (or entered in Discogs) it is harder to find out which track it actually is. For regular releases (where the title simply has been translated) it is usually not that difficult. But, for cover versions it can be. How to indicate translations has been the matter of debate inside Discogs. At some point the solution was to enter both the original title and...

A few days ago another data dump was released covering all releases up until (and including) November 30 2019, so I can look at some statistics again. If you don't know how this works, I would recommend reading the previous articles about it, for example the article about October 2019 . Release statistics I looked at the dump file with new data entered and changes made from November 1 - November 30 2019. This dump file has 11,854,877 releases, whereas the previous one had 11,751,696. That means 103,181 releases more. Also: 11,249,513 releases stayed the same 500,202 releases were changed 105,162 releases were added 1,981 releases were removed from the database 588 releases had status Draft, Deleted or Rejected 0 releases that were not Accepted were in both dumps 3 releases were moved from Draft to Accepted Changes in the data (that is: changes to already existing releases) are distributed as follows: Existing releases changed in November 2019 Smells I fou...