Vinyl & Data

One mistake that I see quite often in the Discogs data is that people use the "Barcode" field for basically everything in the section "Barcode and Other Identifiers" (or "BaOI" in Discogs lingo). This is not very surprising, as "Barcode" is the default value and no checking is done. Almost two years ago I already checked in how many releases the "Barcode" field was used to store the value of a rights society and found around 400 releases, which resulted in the following graph: Rights societies in the "Barcode" field in January 2018 although I honestly cannot remember how robust my checks were at that time (I believe they missed quite some data). I thought it would be interesting to see what I would find in the current data set. The result: 1118 unique releases, and distributed across the data as follows: Rights societies in the "Barcode" field in October 2019 So that is significantly more. A few things...

Continuing with my research into barcodes in the Discogs database: which barcodes appear most often? If you haven't already I would recommend reading part 1 , part 2 and part 3 of this series first. One thing that I was wondering about is which barcodes are found the most. The top 10 values for the barcode field looks like this: 1411: 4820011260011 1252: 4 820011 260011 > 827: 6456489431561 826: 6 456489 431561 460: 4 64043 51662 9 455: 464043516629 447: 4 60980-06754 5 437: 4 619497 411525 429: 4619497411525 427: 460980067545 Because one release could have multiple barcode fields (frequently one for the text representation and one for the scanned version) there is some overlap and the top 10 is actually just 5 different barcodes. I was wondering which release was at number one and to my surprise it was a release by Dissection . To my knowledge the majority of the people on Discogs are not into extreme metal, so I looked a bit further at what other releases ha...

Continuing with poking into the barcode field: in this post I am going to look at the releases that I think have a valid barcode. Before you read this it is good to first read part 1 and part 2 . After processing all the entries with barcode fields I have 3,313,415 potentially valid barcodes, although I am pretty sure that not all of them will be valid. I looked at the length of the possible barcodes and got this list (after cleaning up whitespace, hyphens, etc.): 13 : 1647416 12 : 1513850 11 : 90840 10 : 30464 14 : 16631 15 : 2817 6 : 2628 8 : 1672 7 : 1410 5 : 1292 18 : 1251 9 : 957 4 : 485 3 : 426 17 : 353 16 : 339 2 : 190 20 : 114 19 : 113 1 : 71 24 : 49 21 : 21 23 : 8 25 : 8 22 : 7 26 : 2 37 : 1 The first two values actually aren't surprising, as they correspond to EAN-13 and UPC respectively. The others need a little bit more attention: codes that are less than 5 I can safely ignore. A barcode with size 37 is certainly intriguing, so I w...

Time to dive further into the barcode information that is stored in Discogs. As I said in part 1 : I didn't look much into this subject before, because of the potential huge number of errors I would uncover. After digging a bit further into the data I can confirm that there are indeed many releases with errors. But on the way I found a few interesting things that I want to share. People can't enter data properly It is surprising to see how many people added a barcode in the Barcode field and then added a '.' that is not part of the barcode and that even cannot be found in the picture: around 150. I have not even counted things like trailing spaces, soft hyphens (whyyyyy?), and so on. Text representations of barcodes are not consistent I looked into some of the descriptions of several barcodes, but they don't seem to describe the barcodes that are in the wild. For example, some EAN-13 barcodes have a '.' in them between the first 12 digits and the check...

One thing that I still haven't properly researched is barcodes. This is not because the barcode field in Discogs is used correctly. Quite the contrary: I am seeing lots of releases where the barcode field is used for all kinds of information that is not a barcode. No, the real reason is that I am afraid of how much bad stuff I will find. The current amount of possible known errors in Discogs is already quite large, even when just looking at part of the "Barcodes and Other Identifiers" section! I haven't even started on verifying other data such as labels, companies, and so on, but I am very sure that as soon as I start processing that the flood gates will be open. But, I have to take the plunge one day, so today is as good as any other. Before I can show some useful results it is good to dive into some specifics about barcodes and how these are used in Discogs. Barcodes My guess is that most people are familiar with barcodes, but if not there is an excellent ar...

One of the fields in the "Barcode and Other Identifiers" section of a release in Discogs is the Rights Society field. These societies are for things like collecting royalties for artists, although I have no idea how they exactly work (and, to be honest, I am not that interested in knowing at the moment). Examples of rights societies are ASCAP, GEMA, BUMA , SGAE and more. The Rights Society field has been around in Discogs for some time, but still quite a few errors are being made. For example, I often see the Other field being used, but also ISRC , Barcode and other fields. A while ago I added support for detecting these to my scripts , and recently refined detection so I could write this blog with some more accurate information. Rights Society errors In the latest Discogs data dump you will find about 30,000 releases where the Rights Society field is not used where it possibly should have been used. This excludes instances of where the value is actually not a rig...