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...

When I was a bit more fanatic about collecting records of a certain artist who were on EMI (and related labels) I quickly learned about how EMI's labels worked and it all seemed very clear: catalog numbers starting with 5C means The Netherlands, 1A is either The Netherlands or Europe (in the 1980s), 5A and 1C are Germany, 4C is Belgium, 2C France, and so on, like mentioned on this page in the Discogs reference site . So I thought that it would be trivial to cross reference EMI label numbers and countries in Discogs to see if they would match and clearly see if anyone would have entered the wrong data and then rightfully scold them for it. But reality turns out to be a bit more complicated than anticipated. What I did is that I looked at all the releases where the catalog number starts with either "5C" or "5c" and checked if the country is The Netherlands. I could find a bit over 6400 releases from the Netherlands: Distribution of Dutch releases with EMI ...