Discogs (short for discographies) is a

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

of information about

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum * Digital audio, representation of sou ...

recording A record, recording or records may refer to: An item or collection of data Computing * Record (computer science), a data structure ** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity ** Boot sector or boot record, r ...

s, including

commercial Commercial may refer to: * a dose of advertising conveyed through media (such as - for example - radio or television) ** Radio advertisement ** Television advertisement * (adjective for:) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and s ...

releases, promotional releases, and

bootleg Bootleg or bootlegging most often refers to: * Bootleg recording, an audio or video recording released unofficially * Rum-running, the illegal business of transporting and trading in alcoholic beverages, hence: ** Moonshine, or illicitly made a ...

or off-label releases. While the site was originally created with a goal of becoming the largest online database of

electronic music Electronic music is a genre of music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments, or circuitry-based music technology in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means ( electro ...

, the site now includes releases in all genres on all formats. After the database was opened to contributions from the public,

rock music Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as " rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles in the mid-1960s and later, particularly in the United States a ...

began to become the most prevalent genre listed. , Discogs contains over 15.7 million releases, by over 8.3 million artists, across over 1.9 million labels, contributed from over 644,000 contributor user accounts – with these figures constantly growing as users continually add previously unlisted releases to the site over time. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

discogs.com, are owned by Zink Media, Inc. and located in

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous ...

, United States.

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 intended to be a large database of electronic music. Lewandowski's original goal was to build the most comprehensive database of

, organized around the artists, labels, and releases available in electronic genres. 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 Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...

in January 2005 and

funk Funk is a music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African Americans in the mi ...

soul In many religious and philosophical traditions, there is a belief that a soul is "the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being". Etymology The Modern English noun '' soul'' is derived from Old English ''sāwol, sāwel''. The earliest att ...

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

and

reggae Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, " Do the Reggay" was the first popular song to use ...

in October of the same year. In January 2006,

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the ...

and non-music (e.g. comedy records, field recordings, interviews) were added.

Classical music Classical music generally refers to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions. It is sometimes distinguished as Western classical music, as the term "classical music" al ...

started being supported in June 2007, and in September 2007 the "final genres were turned on" – adding support for the Stage & Screen, Brass & Military, Children's, and Folk, World, & Country music genres, allowing capture of virtually every single type of audio recording that has ever been released. In June 2004, Discogs released a report claiming that it had 15,788 contributors and 260,789 releases. In late 2005, the Discogs marketplace was launched. In 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 The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century, a ...

though 60 days of information was freeaccess 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 different revenue stream had been found from sellers and purchasers. Later that year, all paid access features were discarded and full use of the site became free of charge, allowing all users to view the full 12-month Market Price History of each item.

Milestones

Discogs publishes information indicating the number of releases, labels, and artists presently in its database, along with its contributors: * Master Release: from 30 April 2009 the function was made available.
† Contributors pages: in mid 2019 these pages were limited to show only the top 5000 users, with the total user count being made private, although the total user count figure was re-added sometime during early 2021 (also the ''About Us'' page mentions "More than 592,000..." have contributed the site.)

Other projects

Discogs has so far created a further six online databases, for collating information on related topics, although only one, ''VinylHub'', remains in use.

VinylHub

In mid-2014, a side project website called VinylHub was started for users to add world-wide information about record stores including location, contact details, what type of items they stocked, etc. In August 2020 it was relocated as part of the main Discogs website, under subdomain ''vinylhub.discogs.com''.

Previous projects

Five other online databases were previously created, however they have since closed.

Filmogs

In late 2014, the company released a new beta website called Filmogs. Users could add their physical film collections (on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, LaserDisc, or any other type of physical film release) to the database, and buy and sell film releases in the global marketplace. The site was closed down on 31 August 2020.

Gearogs

Gearogs was launched as a beta in late 2014, at the same time as Filmogs. The site let users add and track music equipment, including items such as synths, drum machines, sequencers, samplers, audio software, and any other electronic music making equipment. The site was closed down on 31 August 2020.

Bibliogs/Bookogs

At the start of 2015, the company began Bibliogs as another beta project. Users could submit information about their books, physical or electronic, different versions and editions, and also connect different credits (writers, illustrators, translators, publishers, etc.) to these books. 21,000 books were submitted by the end of 2016. The project was in beta phase until 15 August 2017 when it reached more than 31,000 book titles, was renamed Bookogs following legal issues with the original name, and removed 'Beta state' notice from the main page. The next day the ''Marketplace Beta'' feature was presented. On 8 June 2019, the project reached a total amount of 100,000 books. The site was closed down on 31 August 2020, counting more than 154,000 books and 345,000 credits.

Comicogs

Comicogs launched around the same time as Bookogs, as a means for comic collectors and enthusiasts to catalog their collections and create an archive of comic releases. Similar to Bookogs, users could contribute comics, manga, graphic novels, and strips to the database, along with information on credits, publishers, writers, etc. 18,000 comics were submitted by the start of 2018. The Comicogs marketplace was launched on 23 August 2017, allowing users to buy and sell comics from across the world. The site was closed down on 3 August 2020.

Posterogs

In September 2017, the company launched Posterogs. Posterogs was the only Discogs site to launch a database and marketplace simultaneously. The scope of Posterogs was left broad at the time of launch, with the company opting to let the community define what type of posters, flyers, or similar, should be included in the database. While non-music related items were fully acceptable for inclusion, much of the primary focus seemed to be on music posters, such as gig/tour posters, album promo posters, and promotional flyers (in keeping with Discogs' music theme), though there were also many film posters in the database. As with all other databases, users could save items to their 'Collection' and 'Wantlist', in addition to buying and selling in the marketplace. The site was closed down on 31 August 2020.

API

In mid-August 2007, Discogs data became publicly accessible via a

REST Rest or REST may refer to: Relief from activity * Sleep ** Bed rest * Kneeling * Lying (position) * Sitting * Squatting position Structural support * Structural support ** Rest (cue sports) ** Armrest ** Headrest ** Footrest Arts and enter ...

ful,

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

-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 The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired ...

one. Prior to the advent of this license and API, Discogs data was only accessible via the Discogs web site's

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

interface and was intended to be viewed only using

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

s. The HTML interface remains the only authorized way to modify Discogs data. On 7 June 2011, version 2 of the API was released. Notable in this release was that a license key was no longer required, the default response was changed from XML to

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other se ...

, and the 5000 queries per day limit was removed (although a limit of 2000 image lookups per days was introduced). On 1 November 2011, a major update to version 2 of the API was released. This new release dropped support for XML, data is always returned in JSON format, however the monthly data dumps of new data are only provided in XML format. On 1 February 2014, Discogs modified their API so that image requests will now require

OAuth OAuth (short for "Open Authorization") is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. T ...

authorization, requiring each user of third-party applications to have a Discogs "application ID", with image requests now limited to 1,000 per day. Additionally the Premium API service was dropped. On 24 June 2014, Discogs deprecated their XML API in lieu of a JSON-formatted API. Discogs also allows full XML downloads of its Release, Artist, and Label data through the ''data.discogs.com'' subdomain. The recommendations API is not publicly available.

Contribution system

The data in Discogs comes from submissions contributed by users who have registered accounts on the site. The system has gone through four 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 would not 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 and 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 four different moderators but in time the amount was decreased to three and then two.

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 is not flagged. Votes consist of a rating of the correctness and 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 and 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.

Discogs-aware metadata software

Tag editors

* ASMT MP3 Tagger – single release tagger *

foobar2000 foobar2000 (often abbreviated as fb2k or f2k) is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Stan ...

–

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the ...

media player and music management software with a plugin * Helium Music Manager – music management software with a plugin * Jaikoz –

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

spreadsheet-based tag editor * Kid3 – open-source project, tagger for all common music formats * Mp3tag – freeware tag editor, batch and spreadsheet interfaces * OrangeCD Catalog – music management software * puddletag – a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

tag editor written for

PyQt PyQt is a Python binding of the cross-platform GUI toolkit Qt, implemented as a Python plug-in. PyQt is free software developed by the British firm Riverbank Computing. It is available under similar terms to Qt versions older than 4.5; this m ...

* taghycardia – freeware, automated MP3 tagger * Tagog – Linux audio file tagger * TagScanner – freeware tag editor with Discogs, FreeDB, TrackType.org support * The GodFather – freeware tag editor * The Tagger –

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

and AAC formats tag editor for

* TigoTago – spreadsheet-based tag editor

Other

* Album Art Downloader – Discogs cover art downloads * Discogs Bar – Discogs navigation and search control

toolbar The toolbar, also called a bar or standard toolbar (originally known as ribbon) is a graphical control element on which on-screen icons can be used. A toolbar often allows for quick access to functions that are commonly used in the program. Some ...

for

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

* Discogs Enhancer – Discogs extension adding extra functionality to

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, ...

(inc. dark mode) * Discographic for Discogs. Client for

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...

devices for iOS * MP3 Filenamer – online MP3 file name generator, based on Discogs release data * Stecotec Musikverwaltung Pro – Music database software by stecotec.de * Music Collector – Music database software by collectorz.com * WWW::Discogs – Perl module for interfacing with the Discogs API * XLD (X Lossless Decoder) – a CD ripper and audio file converter for

References

External links

* {{Authority control American music websites Companies based in Portland, Oregon Internet properties established in 2000 Online music and lyrics databases Social cataloging applications