Vinyl & Data

While digging through releases in Discogs I spotted that some of them had a reference to a Creative Commons license . As I am dealing with open source licensing (of software) on a daily basis it of course immediately drew my attention and I started to wonder how many of the releases in the Discogs database have a reference to Creative Commons. I (again) grabbed the latest data dump from Discogs (which itself is under a CC0 license, so quite fitting), and adapted my scripts to report if there were any references to Creative Commons in either the free text fields, the notes or in some of the descriptions in the "Barcode and Other Identifiers" (BaOI) sections and found 7884 releases. I plotted the results of the release numbers, which you can see below (first bar: release number 1 - 999,999, second bar release number 1,000,000 - 1,999,999, and so on): Distribution of possibly CC-licensed works in the Discogs database What strikes me is that for older releases there are...

And again it is time to dive into the world of SID codes. Before reading this post it is advised to read part 1 and part 2 . Before I used Discogs I had not heard of SID codes and never realized that they can (somewhat) be used help date a release, as SID codes were only introduced in 1994. I found out by accident when I was browsing through Discogs and found this release that I have had for many years. I bought it back in 1994 or 1995 and always wondered why it showed up in the shop (new) then even though it had supposedly been available already a number of years before. This year I found out  after learning about SID codes that my copy is a later repress . This made me wonder: how many releases in the Discogs database are there that have some SID code defined, but have the year set to something earlier than 1994? I added a check to my scripts and analyzed the latest available Discogs data dump (with data until November 1 2017) and found 3092 releases with a release dat...

Another round of digging into SID codes. Before you read this it is highly advised to first read part 1 about SID codes. In the first part I wondered how many releases have SID fields defined, but have something in there that isn't an actual SID code. For that it is important to know what a valid SID code actually means. Valid SID codes According to the IFPI specifications this is a valid SID code: "The SID Code consists of the letters 'IFPI', followed by either four or five additional characters, which may be alphabetical or numerical [...]" which seems very clear. There are a few extra restrictions: the additional characters in the mastering SID code always have to start with "L", and mould SID codes cannot use the characters "I", "O", "S" or "Q" (it is unclear from the document if this is just for mould SID codes, or also for mastering SID codes). With that background information I (partially) adapt...

In Discogs each release is assigned a number. At the moment (November 27 2017) the number of releases in Discogs is a bit over 9,200,000, while the latest release number is a bit over 11,200,000. That means that 2 million release numbers (around 17.85%) have gone from the database and about 82.15% of releases that were added are still in the database. Around 2 million release numbers have been removed from the Discogs database. [EDIT 2017-11-28: I was told by Discogs that every Draft is also assigned a release number and many drafts don't ever get submitted to the database, so they simply do not appear in the database] In a previous post I wondered if Discogs is getting increasingly "sparse". I kept thinking about it, so I decided to just look at the data to see if my suspicion ("Discogs is getting increasingly sparse") was right. Why releases disappear from Discogs There are several reasons why releases disappear from Discogs. The most common reason is...

One thing that I only learned about after using Discogs is the so called Source Identification Code, or SID. These codes were introduced in 1994 to combat piracy and to find out on which machines a CD was made. It was introduced by Philips and adopted by IFPI, and specifications are publicly available which clearly describe the two available SID codes (mastering SID code and mould SID code). Since quite a few months Discogs has two fields available in the " Barcode and Other Identifiers " (BaOI) section: Mould SID code Mastering SID code A few questions immediately popped up in my mind: how many releases don't have a SID field defined when there should be (for example, the free text field indicates it is a SID field)? how many releases have a SID field with values that should not be in the SID field? how many release have a SID field, but a wrong year (as SID codes were only introduced in 1994) how many vinyl releases have a SID code defined (which is impossi...

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.

Ranting time. Something that I think Discogs got right is that when editing a release you can see the entire editing history and view earlier versions of the page. This makes it lot easier to see when a particular change was introduced and allow you to "debug" a page: some people make changes that turn out to be wrong, or information got lost and it needs to be restored, or a page got vandalized (there are a few disgruntled ex-users that come and go and changes need to be reverted. Having the entire history available makes that possible. Other collaborative systems like Wikipedia have this feature as well where it has proven to be incredibly useful. In Discogs it is mandatory to describe changes to releases in the so called submission notes. For me as a software engineer using open source software this is completely normal: you create a change, and describe the change, otherwise it becomes cumbersome down the line and you are asking yourself "what is this change and wh...

It is time for me to dig into SPARS codes again. Before reading this article it is advised to first read part 1 and part 2 of this series about SPARS codes. One thing that noticed when digging into possible smells for SPARS codes is that sometimes I would see a code named CDC that was tagged as a SPARS code. As that letter actually isn't in the SPARS code specifications I was wondering what it was and how often it appeared in the Discogs database. As it turns out this is a code specific to Sony Music that somehow indicates the format. There are more have these codes, which have been discussed several times in the Discogs forums already. I updated my scripts to see how many of these Sony Music codes were in SPARS Code fields. Surprisingly few: I could find just 23 but lots of SPARS Code fields still need to be fixed, so I am expecting more to pop up once these get "fixed". As always, scripts have been updated to check for these Sony codes in SPARS code fi...