Vinyl & Data

About 1.5 year ago I discovered that some people use the wrong character set in the "Rights Society" field, because characters in various character sets (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek) look alike (the so called "homoglyphs"). Some people even mixed characters from different character sets. You can read the articles I wrote here and here and I would recommend you read those first as I will be making comparisons with the data presented there. I was wondering if this situation had actually changed, or if things got worse, so I ran my scripts and found 1146 releases where I know that the wrong character set(s) were used. The distribution across the data set is as follows: Distribution of releases with using the wrong character set(s) for Rights Society Comparing it to the data from 1.5 years ago it seems to have gotten a little bit worse (though not much). As long as there is no search functionality for rights societies on the Discogs website it won't matter muc...

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...

Today it's time for a very short post. I decided to look a little bit deeper into the wrong values of rights societies that I uncovered (I wrote about this earlier ). I was surprised about the large number of errors. One error that I found were that there are quite a few releases with homoglyphs (more about that in a later article, it will be interesting) and I was wondering if these errors really are just made by people submitting it, or if there really are releases where the companies made a mistake. The answer: a bit of both. While most of the time it actually is the submitters who made mistakes there are a few releases where the labels indeed seem wrong. I looked into STEMPRA, which probably should be STEMRA, but there are at least two releases where this is not the case and the labels actually say STEMPRA: this unofficial release and this official release . It certainly doesn't make things easier, as you cannot assume that it is indeed a misspelling.

The Rights Society field in Discogs is a big potential source of issues. The reason is: almost all releases out there have one, or more, rights societies printed on them. I already looked into where the Rights Society field perhaps should have been used, but wasn't. What I didn't look at is whether or not the values of the releases that have one or more Rights Society fields are actually correct. I took the latest data dump and ran some tests. I haven't added the check to my scripts because there were too many false positives (although I will add a few sanity checks soon), but I still found a few interesting things. BIEM One rights society (at least according to the list of rights societies on Discogs, as it appears to be more of an umbrella organization) is BIEM . Some misspellings that I found: BOEM: 2 times BEIM: 122 times (although for at least one release it is printed like that on the disc) BIME: 2 times BIEN: 82 times STEMRA Another rights soci...

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...