Vinyl & Data

The field in the Discogs database that is definitely the most misunderstood is the so called "Label Code". Many people think that this is a generic "catch all" field for any code printed on a label, but that is COMPLETELY WRONG . The Label Code is a (somewhat) unique identifier for a record label. It was introduced in Europe somewhere in the 1970s and is now in widespread use. This is all explained in the other articles I have written about this field and I recommend you read those first (especially the first article ). Many Discogs contributors think that just because there is a code on a label it should be in the Label Code field. In the latest download (all releases up until October 31 2019) there are a bit over 44,000 releases that have a wrong value in this field. That's quite a few. Then there are also releases where a Label Code should be present, but isn't (and of course I don't know how many), plus around 9,000 where someone indicated that ...

Today a short post, again about label codes. Before reading this post it is recommended to first read part 1 and part 2 about Label Code fields in Dicsogs. Label Code in format free text field One thing I wondered about is: how often would a valid label code would pop up in the free text field of the format description. This was fairly easy to check. In the latest Discogs dump: just 4, where 1 actually had a Label Code field and the free text field in Format just contained duplicate information. These were all fixed very easily. To be honest I had expected quite a few more, so this was a positive surprise.

One thing that I wondered about is: how many people can get the label code wrong? The label code is very simple: the letters LC (uppercase or lowercase), possibly followed by whitespace, a colon, a dash, etc. and then 4 to 6 digits. Label codes with 6 digits are still extremely rare but will start to pop up as soon as there are no more 5 digit label codes (the official website is at just over 78,000 now). Many of the label codes are prefixed with zeroes to fill the number to 4 or 5 digits, for example: LC00123. Since 0 (zero) is easy to confuse with O (capital o) I wondered how many entries that likely are a valid label code use O (capital o) instead of 0 (zero). I took the October 2017 dump and searched for Label Code fields where the value started with LC or lc , and contained O (capital o). I found 131 unique releases with in total 133 Label Code fields, which is actually surprisingly low. Of these a few were also: non-compliant label codes, for example this release (rev...

One piece of information that you can find on European releases that you will typically not see on other releases is the so called "Label Code". This code, handed out by GVL in Germany, uniquely identifies the label on which a record was released. Full background can be found on the German Wikipedia page about Label Codes . Discogs has a field dedicated to these codes in its database as well, and a partial list of the label codes (new labels, plus mutations, starting 01-01-2017) is available from the GVL website, so that opens up quite a few possibilities to compare data from the database with the external list from GVL, as well as with the rest of the data in the dump. Fun! Label Code structure Label Codes are very simple: first the letters LC (usually uppercase, but likely lowercase characters are used here and there too), followed by 4 or 5 digits, and sometimes some delimiter (whitespace, hyphen and possibly others as well). A few common examples are below but ...