Discogs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Discogs, short for discographies, is a website and database of information about music recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and certain 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 is believed to be the largest online database of releases on vinyl media. Across all genres and formats, over 717,000 releases are catalogued. It also features listings for over 581,000 artists and over 63,000 labels. The site has around 100,000 visitors a day[citation needed].
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[edit] History
The discogs.com domain name was registered in August 2000, and Discogs itself was launched in October 2000 by programmer, DJ, and music fan Kevin Lewandowski as a database of his private record collection.
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 (Version 2), 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 and world/folk music were to be supported starting in October 2006, but that has been put on hold pending database restructuring issues still being discussed.
On June 30, 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 [1]. 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.
Lewandowski plans to make the data in Discogs available in convenient formats such as XML, but until then, the site's data is only accessible via the HTML interface and is intended to be viewed only using web browsers; attempts to "screen scrape" or use other automated means to interact with Discogs are expressly forbidden. [2]
[edit] Contribution system
The data in Discogs comes from submissions contributed by users who have registered accounts on the site. There is a group of privileged users, called moderators, who vote on whether each submission should be accepted or rejected. A smaller group of users, called editors, have higher privileges and can approve certain changes to existing information. More recently the divisions between moderators and editors have been blurred, with all moderators given extra privileges, such as the ability to vote on new submissions, edits to existing database entries, the addition and removal of images, and artist and label profiles. Some facilities, such as the ability to vote on deleting releases or the merging of duplicate releases, artists, or labels, are still confined to the editors.
Discogs uses a point system to rank users based on the number and type of approved submissions. Users with higher rank are allowed to make more submissions. Users are awarded 3 points for a successful release submission and 1 point on any other edit to the database. Recently, the number of points given for submitting releases has increased according to the number of images also added to the release.
Submitting releases is a complex process, starting from the input of various data of the release, to checking for errors within that data. The time it takes for a release to go from being a pending submission to an approved release can vary from a few days to several months. [3]
[edit] Copyright
The Discogs website and its aggregate collection of compiled data are subject to copyright (to the extent that copyright applies to a database and web site consisting of public contributions) and a terms of use agreement, information about which is on the site.
[edit] Software
Although Discogs terms of service did not allow accessing the site via a robot[4], a number of tag editors have been released that support the Discogs database.
- ASMT MP3 Tagger - single release tagger with discogs support
- Helium Music Manager - music management software with a plugin for discogs support
- TigoTago - spreadsheet-based tag editor with discogs support
- MP3 Collection Organizer - batch tagger with discogs support
- MP3tag
