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What happened in Discogs in January 2020?

Normally I would have expected this post to have been published earlier, but Discogs didn't release its data earlier. In the past the data dumps would be released around the 4th or 5th of the month, but now it took until February 24th before there was a data dump. I then looked at the data and just threw it into a corner and left it there for a few months.

This is going to be a little bit different than the other blog posts in this series. The reason is that the internal format seems to have changed again. In the past the dump file would grow with around 100 MiB per month and it has done this very consistently over years. So when I saw that in one month the archive had grown with 1 GiB (about ten times the expected increase) I knew something was up. A short inspection: a lot of the YouTube video information is now included, so comparing the XML data as I have done so far actually makes no sense at all, as with the new data that is included a release would have been marked as "changed", even when the only change was a YouTube link but not the actually relevant data. Rewriting my comparisons is on my TODO list but for that I first need to find the time. Bah.

So, no comparison to how things were last month, but just a bit about the smells.

Smells

I found 2158 possible smells in newly added releases (ignoring tracklist errors which still remain the bulk of the errors). It is very similar to previous months: a bit less than half are label codes, around a quarter are SID codes, and then the rest.
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