
Discogs has cracked the nut, struck the right balance, and is therefore an absolute Internet treasure– Thank you.
If you don’t know them, Discogs is a central resource for the LP/78/CD music communities, and as Wikipedia said “As of 28 August 2019 Discogs contained over 11.6 million releases, by over 6 million artists, across over 1.3 million labels, contributed from over 456,000 contributor user accounts—with these figures constantly growing…”
When I met the founder, Kevin Lewandowski, a year ago he said the Portland based company supports 80 employees and is growing. They make money by being a marketplace for buyers and sellers of discs. An LP dealer I met in Oklahoma sells most of his discs through discogs as well as going at record fairs.
The data about records is spectacularly clean. Compare it to Ebay, where the data is scattershot, and you have something quite different and reusable. It is the best parts of musicbrainz, CDDB, and Ebay– where users can catalog their collections and buy/sell records. By starting with the community function, Kevin said, the quality started out really good, and then adding the market place later led it to its success.
But there is something else Discogs does that sets it apart from many other commercial websites, and this makes All The Difference:
Discogs also makes their data available, in bulk, and with a free-to-use API.
The Great 78 Project has leveraged this bulk database to help find the date of release for 78’s. Just yesterday, I downloaded the new dataset and added it to our 78rpm date database, and in last year 10’s of thousands more 78’s were added to discogs, and we found 1,500 more dates for our existing 78’s. Thank you!
The Internet Archive Lost Vinyl Project leverages the API’s by looking up records we will be digitizing to find track listings.
A donor to our CD project used the public price information to appraise the CDs he donated for a tax write-off.
We want to add links back from Discogs to the Internet Archive and they have not allowed that yet (please please), but there is always something more to do.
I hope other sites, even commercial ones, would allow bulk access to their data (an API is not enough).
Thank you, Discogs.