Discogs
Encyclopedia
Discogs, short for discographies
, is a website
and database
of information about audio
recording
s, including commercial
releases, promotional releases, and bootleg
or off-label releases. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the domain name
discogs.com, are owned by Zink Media, Inc., and are located in Portland, Oregon
, USA
. Discogs is one of the largest online databases of electronic music
releases and of releases on vinyl media.
He was inspired by the success of community-built sites such as Slashdot
, eBay
, and Open Directory Project
, and decided to use this model for a music discography database.
The site's original goal was to build the most comprehensive database of electronic music
, organized around the artists, labels, and releases available in that genre. In 2003 the Discogs system was completely rewritten, and in January 2004 it began to support other genres, starting with hip hop
. Since then, it has expanded to include rock
and jazz
in January 2005 and funk
/soul
, latin
, and reggae
in October of the same year. In January 2006 blues
and non-music (e.g. comedy records, field recordings, interviews) were added. Classical music started being supported in June 2007, and in October 2007 the "final genres were turned on" - now adding support for the Stage & Screen, Brass & Military, Children's, and Folk, World, & Country music genres and indeed allowing capture of virtually every single kind of audio recording that has ever been released.
On 30 June 2004, Discogs published its last report, which included information about the number of its contributors. This report claims that Discogs has 15,788 contributors and 260,789 releases. On the Discogs homepage there is information indicating the number of releases, labels, and artists presently in the database. In 2006 the number of releases in the database passed the 500,000 mark. On July 25, 2010 the database contained 2,006,878 releases, 1,603,161 artists and 169,923 labels.
On 20 July 2007 a new system for sellers was introduced on the site called Market Price History. It made information available to users who paid for a subscription —though 60 days information was free— access to the past price items were sold for up to 12 months ago by previous sellers who had sold exactly the same release. At the same time, the US$12 per year charge for advanced subscriptions was abolished, as it was felt that the extra features should be made available to all subscribers now that a better, some may say fairer, revenue stream
had been found from sellers and purchasers. However, at the beginning of 2008, the Market Price History was also made free of charge for all users, still giving up to a 12 month view of historical sales data for any release.
In mid-August 2007, Discogs data became publicly accessible via a REST
ful, XML
-based API
and a license that allowed specially attributed use, but did not allow anyone to "alter, transform, or build upon" the data. The license has since been changed to a public domain one. Prior to the advent of this license and API, Discogs data was only accessible via the Discogs web site's HTML
interface and was intended to be viewed only using web browser
s. The HTML interface remains the only authorized way to modify Discogs data.
Any item can be voted on at any time, even if it isn't flagged. Votes consist of a rating of the correctness & completeness of the full set of data for an item (not just the most recent changes), as assessed by users who have been automatically determined, by an undisclosed algorithm, to be experienced & reliable enough to be allowed to cast votes. An item's "average" vote is displayed with the item's data.
The ranking system has also changed in v4. In v3, rank points were only awarded to submitters when a submission was "Accepted" by moderator votes. While in v4, rank points are now awarded immediately when a submission is made, regardless of the accuracy of the information and what votes it eventually receives, if any.
Discography
Discography is the study and listing of the details concerning sound recordings, often by specified artists or within identified musical genres...
, is a website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
and database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
of information about audio
Sound
Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...
recording
Recording
Recording is the process of capturing data or translating information to a recording format stored on some storage medium, which is often referred to as a record or, if an auditory medium, a recording....
s, including commercial
Commerce
While business refers to the value-creating activities of an organization for profit, commerce means the whole system of an economy that constitutes an environment for business. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural, and technological systems that are in operation in any...
releases, promotional releases, and bootleg
Bootleg recording
A bootleg recording is an audio or video recording of a performance that was not officially released by the artist or under other legal authority. The process of making and distributing such recordings is known as bootlegging...
or off-label releases. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the domain name
Domain name
A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System ....
discogs.com, are owned by Zink Media, Inc., and are located in Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, USA
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. Discogs is one of the largest online databases of electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
releases and of releases on vinyl media.
History
The discogs.com domain name was registered in August 2000, and Discogs itself was launched in November 2000 by programmer, DJ, and music fan Kevin Lewandowski originally as a database of electronic music.He was inspired by the success of community-built sites such as Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
, eBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
, and Open Directory Project
Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz , is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings...
, and decided to use this model for a music discography database.
The site's original goal was to build the most comprehensive database of electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
, organized around the artists, labels, and releases available in that genre. In 2003 the Discogs system was completely rewritten, and in January 2004 it began to support other genres, starting with hip hop
Hip hop music
Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...
. Since then, it has expanded to include rock
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
and jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
in January 2005 and funk
Funk
Funk is a music genre that originated in the mid-late 1960s when African American musicians blended soul music, jazz and R&B into a rhythmic, danceable new form of music. Funk de-emphasizes melody and harmony and brings a strong rhythmic groove of electric bass and drums to the foreground...
/soul
Soul music
Soul music is a music genre originating in the United States combining elements of gospel music and rhythm and blues. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, soul is "music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a form of...
, latin
Latin American music
Latin American music, found within Central and South America, is a series of musical styles and genres that mixes influences from Spanish, African and indigenous sources, that has recently become very famous in the US.-Argentina:...
, and reggae
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...
in October of the same year. In January 2006 blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
and non-music (e.g. comedy records, field recordings, interviews) were added. Classical music started being supported in June 2007, and in October 2007 the "final genres were turned on" - now adding support for the Stage & Screen, Brass & Military, Children's, and Folk, World, & Country music genres and indeed allowing capture of virtually every single kind of audio recording that has ever been released.
On 30 June 2004, Discogs published its last report, which included information about the number of its contributors. This report claims that Discogs has 15,788 contributors and 260,789 releases. On the Discogs homepage there is information indicating the number of releases, labels, and artists presently in the database. In 2006 the number of releases in the database passed the 500,000 mark. On July 25, 2010 the database contained 2,006,878 releases, 1,603,161 artists and 169,923 labels.
On 20 July 2007 a new system for sellers was introduced on the site called Market Price History. It made information available to users who paid for a subscription —though 60 days information was free— access to the past price items were sold for up to 12 months ago by previous sellers who had sold exactly the same release. At the same time, the US$12 per year charge for advanced subscriptions was abolished, as it was felt that the extra features should be made available to all subscribers now that a better, some may say fairer, revenue stream
Revenue stream
A revenue stream is a form of revenue. Revenue streams refer specifically to the individual methods by which money comes into a company. Revenue streams may be characterized...
had been found from sellers and purchasers. However, at the beginning of 2008, the Market Price History was also made free of charge for all users, still giving up to a 12 month view of historical sales data for any release.
In mid-August 2007, Discogs data became publicly accessible via a REST
Representational State Transfer
Representational state transfer is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation...
ful, XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
-based API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
and a license that allowed specially attributed use, but did not allow anyone to "alter, transform, or build upon" the data. The license has since been changed to a public domain one. Prior to the advent of this license and API, Discogs data was only accessible via the Discogs web site's HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
interface and was intended to be viewed only using web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
s. The HTML interface remains the only authorized way to modify Discogs data.
Contribution system
The data in Discogs comes from submissions contributed by users who have registered accounts on the web site. The system has gone through 4 major revisions.Version One (V1)
All incoming submissions were checked for formal and factual correctness by privileged users called "moderators", or "mods" for short, who had been selected by site management. Submissions and edits wouldn't become visible or searchable until they received a single positive vote from a "mod". An even smaller pool of super-moderators called "editors" had the power to vote on proposed edits to artist & label data.Version Two (V2)
This version introduced the concept of "submission limits" which prevented new users from submitting more than 2-3 releases for moderation. The number of possible submissions by a user increased on a logarithmic scale. The purpose of this was two-fold: 1) it helped keep the submission queue fairly small and manageable for moderators, and 2) it allowed the new user to acclimatise themselves slowly with the many formatting rules and guidelines of submitting to Discogs. Releases required a number of votes to be accepted into the database - initially the number of votes required was from 4 different moderators but in time the amount was decreased to 3 and then 2.Version Three (V3)
V3 launched in August 2007. Submission limits were eliminated, allowing each user to submit an unlimited number of updates and new entries. New releases added to the database were explicitly marked as "Unmoderated" with a top banner, and updates to existing items, such as releases, artists, or labels, were not shown (or available to search engines or casual visitors) until they were approved by the moderators.Version Four (V4)
This system launched on 10 March 2008. New submissions and edits currently take effect immediately. Any time a new release is added or old release edited, that entry becomes flagged as needing "votes" (initially, "review," but this term caused confusion). A flagged entry is marked as a full yellow bar across a release in the list views and, like version three, a banner on the submission itself — although, initially, this banner was omitted.Any item can be voted on at any time, even if it isn't flagged. Votes consist of a rating of the correctness & completeness of the full set of data for an item (not just the most recent changes), as assessed by users who have been automatically determined, by an undisclosed algorithm, to be experienced & reliable enough to be allowed to cast votes. An item's "average" vote is displayed with the item's data.
The ranking system has also changed in v4. In v3, rank points were only awarded to submitters when a submission was "Accepted" by moderator votes. While in v4, rank points are now awarded immediately when a submission is made, regardless of the accuracy of the information and what votes it eventually receives, if any.
Tag editors
- Mp3tagMp3tagMp3tag is a freeware metadata editor for many audio file formats. It runs on Microsoft Windows.It includes support for the following audio formats: AAC, FLAC, APE, MP3, MPEG-4 , MPC, OGG, OptimFROG OFR, OFS, SPX, TAK, TTA, WMA, WV-Features:*Batch Tag Editing...
— freewareFreewareFreeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
tag editorTag editorA tag editor is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content...
with Discogs support (batch and spreadsheet interfaces). - foobar2000Foobar2000foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Windows developed by Peter Pawlowski, a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft. It is known for its highly modular design and extensive SDK which allows third-party developers to do such things as completely replace the interface...
— freeware media player & music management software with a plugin for Discogs support. - TagScanner — freewareFreewareFreeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
tag editorTag editorA tag editor is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content...
with Discogs, FreeDB, TrackType.org support. - ASMT MP3 Tagger — single release tagger with Discogs support.
- Helium Music Manager — music management software with a plugin for Discogs support.
- OrangeCD Catalog - music management software with Discogs support.
- TigoTago — spreadsheet-based tag editor with Discogs support.
- MP3 Collection Organizer — batch tagger with Discogs support.
- The GodFather — freewareFreewareFreeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
tag editorTag editorA tag editor is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content...
with Discogs script support. - The Tagger — MP3MP3MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
and AACAdvanced Audio CodingAdvanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....
formats tag editorTag editorA tag editor is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content...
for Mac OS XMac OS XMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
with Discogs support. - Tagog — Linux audio file tagger with Discogs support.
- JaikozJaikozJaikoz is a Java program used for editing and mass tagging music file tags. Jaikoz generates acoustic fingerprints of your files and looks up the PUID and the existing metadata from the MusicBrainz or Discogs service...
- OSX/Windows/Linux spreadsheet-based tag editorTag editorA tag editor is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content...
with Discogs support
Other
- MP3 Filenamer - Online MP3 file name generator, based on Discogs release data.
- Discogs Bar - Discogs navigation and search control toolbarToolbarIn a graphical user interface, on a computer monitor, a toolbar is a GUI widget on which on-screen buttons, icons, menus, or other input or output elements are placed. Toolbars are seen in office suites, graphics editors, and web browsers...
for Firefox. - Album Art Downloader - Discogs cover art downloads.
- WWW::Discogs - Perl module for interfacing with the Discogs API.
Main sites
- Discogs – official site
- Discogs Pivotal Tracker – ongoing site issues/bugs and future feature implementation
- Discogs wiki – Discogs own wiki site, for discussions on issues and future feature ideas
- Disbugs – ongoing site issues/bugs and feature requests (archive)
Other sites
- Discogs status blog on BloggerBlogger (service)Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish...
– current site status/maintenance report - Discogs news blog on BloggerBlogger (service)Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish...
– online diary of news, temporary bugs, feature changes/updates – online social networking for users – online user chat