Skip to main content

Are ISRC codes being fixed? Yes they are! (2)

Because a new data dump was released today I decided to look a bit further into the ISRC codes and how they are being fixed. Before you read further I would advise to read the previous blog post about this topic first.

In the previous article I had the following data for the amount of releases with a (possible) ISRC code, but not using the ISRC field:

  • 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
In the January 2020 dump this is further down to 8,893 releases, so that's good news. I am hopeful that in the next few months that all the obvious mistakes will have been fixed (there are also a few edge cases I need to research further so I can filter them out).

To catch that in bar charts: I plotted the release numbers that are in need of fixing for some of the dumps, and you can see them below. As always: the first bar is for releases 1 - 999,999, the second bar for 1,000,000 - 1,999,999 and so on.

In May 2019 there are still many releases that need to be fixed:

May 2019
In October 2019 the releases in need of fixing has halved and going further down in the following two months:


October 2019
November 2019
December 2019

and finally in January 2020:


Janary 2020
What can be seen is that especially for the ranges 8,000,000 - 8,999,999 and 9,000,000 - 9,999,999 there have been lots of fixes, and releases that need to be fixed are mostly the older releases.
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