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 ...
A blog dedicated to two of my hobbies: vinyl records and digital data and exploring where the two intersect. This blog is not affiliated with Discogs, but uses a lot of its data. On Discogs you can find me as metalmijn. I also get a lot of help from a friend you can find on Discogs as gerjolp Check out my Discogs cleanup scripts at: https://github.com/armijnhemel/cleanup-for-discogs/