Discogs
| File:Discogs.Logo.png | |
Type of site | Music |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Zink Media, Inc. |
| Created by | Kevin Lewandowski |
| Revenue | Advertisement, Marketplace Seller Fees |
| URL | http://www.discogs.com |
| Commercial | Partially |
| Registration | Optional |
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 1,019,000 releases are catalogued. It also features listings for over 874,000 artists and over 87,500 labels. The site has around 200,000 visitors a day[citation needed].
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 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 [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.
On 20 July 2007 a new system for sellers was introduced on the site called Market Price History (see old pricing here), 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 more 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 RESTful, XML-based API and a license that allows specially attributed use, but does not allow anyone to "alter, transform, or build upon" the data.[2][3][4] 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 browsers.[5] The HTML interface remains the only authorized way to modify Discogs data.[3]
Contribution system
The data in Discogs comes from submissions contributed by users who have registered accounts on the web site.
All incoming submissions used to be checked for formal and factual correctness by more experienced users who had been selected by their peers to be "moderators". New items added to the database were explicitly marked as "pending", and updates to existing releases, artist and label pages were not shown until they were approved by the moderators. Approval was a simple yes/no vote, and most submissions needed two yes-votes to be approved. An even smaller pool of super-moderators called "editors" had the power to vote on proposed edits to artist & label data.
This system was abandoned on March 10, 2008, with the launch of Discogs v4. In v4, new submissions and edits take effect immediately, and there is no longer any distinction between pending and approved edits. Instead, new items and items subjected to edits are flagged as needing "votes," (initially, "review," but this term caused confusion). Any item can be voted on at any time, even if it isn't flagged. Votes consist of a rating of the data's correctness & completeness, as determined 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 part of the release, artist, or label data.[6]
However this has caused controversy with most active users and all former moderators because of what is perceived to be a substantially reduced reliability and usability of the database.
Software
Tag editors
- MP3tag - freeware tag editor with Discogs support (batch and spreadsheet interfaces).
- foobar2000 - freeware media player & music management software with a plugin for Discogs support.
- 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.
Other
- MP3 Filenamer - Online MP3 file name generator, based on Discogs release data.
- Discogs Bar - Discogs navigation and search control toolbar for Firefox.
See also
References
- ^ Discogs in Alexa
- ^ Kevin Lewandowski (August 2007). "Open Data + API (Discogs News forum post)". Retrieved 2007-08-27.
- ^ a b Kevin Lewandowski (August 2007). "Discogs Data License". Retrieved 2007-08-27.
- ^ Kevin Lewandowski (August 2007). "Discogs API Documentation". Retrieved 2007-08-27.
- ^ "Terms of service changes (forum thread)". 2005-06-15. Retrieved 2007-08-27.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Kevin Lewandowski (February 2008). "Restructuring of Moderation/Voting System". Retrieved 2008-03-17.