Vinyl & Data

I am going to deviate from my usual path a bit, mostly to show the power of having a lot of (correct) data. At some point in the 1980s EMI moved its Spanish office from Barcelona to Madrid. I wanted to see if I could pinpoint when this happened. According to the EMI-Odeon label page on Discogs there were a few addresses in/around Barcelona and one in Madrid. What I noticed when looking at labels of EMI releases is that at some point a few things in the label designs and on the sleeves changed: the region for the depósito legal the name of the company the address of the company An example of a release with the old address is Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf" from 1982. An example of a release with the new address is Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" from 1993. So the change of address must have happened sometime between those two releases, but when exactly? I took the data dump released in June 2019 as a basis, extracted all the Spanish releases...

Time to bring two topics together: finding promising releases for fixing and image processing. The first topic I wrote about in this post , the second topic I wrote about in a series of posts, ending with a large test of images of a specific Spanish label . I specifically focused on cherry picking the releases with 1 image to see if that image contained a label. I found 1299 releases with 1 image for this label and compared it with the releases that I found a label for. The results were, as expected, very poor: for only 9 releases with 1 image the image was actually a label. Of these a few already had the right depósito legal information on the release page (and I hadn't filtered for that this time), some had already been updated and others didn't show the label with the depósito legal information on it, but the label of the other side. Still I would consider this a resounding success, because now I don't have to look at the 1290 other releases, but can very efficient...

So far these blogs have been about detecting wrong information in releases that people entered into the database, but there are also other errors that are much harder to find, namely detecting if a release is missing information and are incomplete. Many releases in Discogs are missing information. One of the things we did for a while was track new Spanish that were added, looking at the pictures (if any) and then adding the missing information, such as the depósito legal, or a rights society. But this does not scale, and it is also quite labour intensive, and it is not easy to remember by heart which releases have already been checked. So I want to optimize to success: which releases will likely be the easiest to fix? I ran a test, where I confined my search to: releases from Spain 7" releases (vinyl, flexi-disc) with the specific goal to fill in the depósito legal field(s) and other things like rights society fields (if not already there). The following was done: first...

Time to dive into one of my pet subjects: the Spanish depósito legal numbers on releases. For morebackground information about this specific identifier it is recommended to first read parts 1 , 2 and 3 . I like the depósito legal number, as it gives good information about when a release was made, or at least it gives a lower bound cut off value (sometimes these numbers are used for reissues as well). But there are people who either don't understand the importance of this identifier, or don't care. This is not just people contributing to Discogs but also people making the releases, as there are many incomplete or impossible versions printed on releases. Especially the latter is weird, as it would be similar to misprinting the ISBN number on a book (although I am sure that must happen as well!). So, I looked at a few smells that I search for to see how often they appear and where using the data dump made on April 1 2019. As always, the labels for the bars mean the range of r...

Time again to dive a bit further into the Spanish depósito legal identifiers to date releases. It is highly recommended to read part 1 and part 2 first before reading this article. Using depósito legal to date a release The year that is embedded in the depósito legal can be used to date a release, but there are a few things to keep in mind. For that it is necessary to know a little bit more about the depósito legal. To get a depósito legal number on a release you first have to apply for it. The release is then assigned a number by the library. This number is then to be printed on the release. This means that the release could never have been prior to the year embedded in the depósito legal number, unless the depósito legal number has been misprinted. However, the depósito legal number could be in the past: maybe a depósito legal was applied for, and then the release was postponed. Or, it was applied for in December and the release was made in January the next year....

It is recommended to read part 1 before reading this article. Depósito Legal as catalog number One thing that I wondered about is: for how many releases did people use a depósito legal identifier as the catalog number? I had seen it a couple of times, and wondered if it was a structural error, or not. After all, it is an easy mistake to make, as many people are not familiar with what these depósito legal numbers actually are, and mistake them for just some number. I adapted my scripts (changes will be added to the repository soon after some cleanups), ran the scripts, and then verified with the data on Discogs: just 65 releases were using a depósito legal as a catalog number, sometimes in addition to the actual catalog number (so should be easy to fix), sometimes instead of the actual catalog number (harder to fix, especially if there are no pictures, of only tiny pictures on which nothing can be seen). This is actually fewer than I expected, so I am pleasantly surprised. Now ...

Every country has its laws which determines what has to be printed on releases. One of the countries where this is most visible is Spain. Especially on older releases you can find one identifier that is of great help to date releases, namely the depósito legal identifier. In Spain it is normal (or perhaps even mandatory) to deposit music releases with a library, similar to the Library of Congress in the US, or other deposit libraries around the world. Each release (not just records, but also books) is assigned an identifier that is printed on it, for example in the picture below: If you want to you can go to a library and search for the item and perhaps listen to it. For example. Queen's Back Chat 7" can be found at the national library in Madrid in Sala Barbieri . It is unfortunately not easy to unlock this information from the website of the national library in Spain (so they still have quite some work to do) and it doesn't seem you can search on the depósito ...