Love me some Discogs. Always scrape against their API to tag my downloads. Marketplace is sick too; never would have imagined that I'd own so much weird shite from Portugal or Germany or Japan or wherever. Maybe one of the few sites left that makes me believe in the internet.
Discogs is great. In my experience doing entity matching/record linkage across all the different music APIs:<p>- Discogs seems to have the most <i>complete</i> release data.<p>- MusicBrainz has the best <i>organized</i> encyclopedic data. For example they have entities for specific instruments, relationships between artists, entries for supporting roles like recording engineer, etc.<p>- Wikipedia still has the best common-sense/canonical info about singles. For example, Wikipedia will tell you in the first sentence (or infobox) "song X was first released on album Y in year Z." Answering that can actually be quite challenging on other services.<p>- Spotify is the go-to for finding useful qualities of individual songs (due to their acquisition of Echo Nest). Things like popularity, danceability, energy, etc.<p>A long-term project of mine has been wrapping all these up in a more approachable API. So far that has only resulted in this big GraphQL schema project: <a href="https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz</a> – but the idea is to build on that and make it even simpler.
What I never quite understood is that I cannot filter or sort on score or something like "just give me the 12" singles". Apart from that Discogs and Whosampled are amazing resources for music freaks that thank god escaped the "Facebook everything" internet of 2020. I do see those weird little music blogs and forums declining, though places like Drexciya Research Labs and Gearslutz still seem to go strong.
I love Discogs. They're such a great site for everything that they offer.<p>Discogs not only has an API [0] but they also provide regular database dumps for free [1]. Last year, I converted tjeir database into SQLite and queried it in various ways to discover new artists or releases that I might be interested in. Ultimately, I realized how much of my favorite music was put out by labels that were headquartered in UK flats that have since been re-leased.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.discogs.com/developers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.discogs.com/developers/</a>
[1] <a href="https://data.discogs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://data.discogs.com/</a>
Discogs is the Wikipedia of the music industry. It’s amazing to see the vast amount of detailed information on every release from mainstream to obscure.
What I really want for Discogs is some kind of database feature, recognising that unique tracks make up releases.<p>So all the individual credits for e.g. the song "The Boys Of Summer" by Don Henley could be updated in one place, and then updated on all the releases it appears on.<p>That would make the site extremely useful to see who played what on which songs, who produced and mixed it etc.<p>You CAN find that information for songs now, but since a track might appear on hundreds of releases, it's impossible to know easily which release has the credits for it.
I'm curious, I never really used discogs since it wasn't integrated with any music players I used, but how does it fare against MusicBrainz? Do they have the same goals? Are they both opensource and open data? I see musicbrainz becoming the standard in opensource projects for music information lookup, but discogs seems absent.
A great part of the internet community, or what's left of it.<p>To a very specific group of people collecting old electronic and dance music, it is indeed invaluable and unique.
Discogs is pretty awesome<p>A friend of mine even found an old LP of his band there after he lost the last copy he had. (They disbanded decades ago and only pressed a small amount of copies)
I need this more than ever now because after many years of using music streaming I've started buying all the music from my youth.<p>Sometimes the disc isn't recognized or you need cover art and discogs is there for free.
Their cookie consent dialog is super annoying. There are a ton of entries (though not the most I've seen). There is no "opt out of all" button. The confirmation to save the opt-outs is hidden down at the bottom of the dialog, on the opposite side from the button to accept-all. Most of the entries are marked as "always active". There is this confusing "object to legitimate interests" button, which I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. I kind of get the idea that it's not an actual opt-out.<p>So no, I'm closing this window and not even reading the content.<p>I thought the EU court clarified that this is not what they meant about reasonable opt-outs being required.
It's been quite a while, so I might be misremembering some of the details, but I was one of the early contributors to the Discogs database.<p>In the beginning it was very much a community driven project and it seemed like the Discogs database would remain open like e.g. Wikipedia with the GFDL, so after pouring in a lot of work it was very disappointing when the project was commercialized and the database closed with a restrictive license.
Some time back, I bought/sold on Discogs in the 12" vinyl category (music_mike) from thrift store finds. I was able to throw together a Cordova app within a day to price stuff while I was out, and their API is simply fantastic.<p>The database is the total accumulation of literal decades of work with almost nothing thrown away, so it's not the cleanest to navigate for a newbie, but it is <i>deep</i>.<p>Thank <i>you</i>, Discogs!
Discogs is amazing in the depth and breadth. It's the only place (other than scanning my own) that I've managed to find cover art and track listings for things like 80s and 90s New Zealand compilation disks, for example. It's a remarkable project.
I don't know much about the cut they take, but it seems like a pretty good opportunity for small record shops and collectors to generate revenue through the marketplace. They have gotten some of my money!<p>An excellent feature is their wishlist. Add releases you would like to obtain, and you can get an email "newsletter" with new/good deals on these releases. You also get to see if one seller has multiple wishlist items to help reduce shipping. Or just browse through the seller's other listings and add a few cheap records without raising the shipping cost.
Wonderful site, wonderful resource.<p>I wish Metal Archives weren't offensively lazy sacks of shit about their own data and made an API. I'd work on that shit for free for them.
I interviewed at Discogs about 3 years ago (after discovering they were local to me in Portland, OR). Seemed like a great group of people working there!
I love discogs and have used it to find a huge amount of new (or new to me) music over the past 10 or so years. I would love to see a discogs streaming service so you can much more easily find this that collaborators have done. I use Spotify currently but find a lot of the user generated playlists on discogs to be higher quality
Love Discogs, have been using it for many years!<p>Some interesting musicological statistics can be computed using their public dumps. For example: <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32931" rel="nofollow">http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32931</a>
Hopefully during the next 20 years they become not a shit hole to work for... have only heard numerous awful things about working for discogs for literally years now. Shame somewhere so nostalgic is so awful for its employees.