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Comment by fireattack | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, Discogs may have better info for the releases it has, but my experience is that the completeness of their data is pretty spotty.

For example, lots of popular artists in Japan (not trying to cherry pick something obscure; Japan after all has the second largest music industry in the world) don't even have an article there, let alone a complete discography.

This is obviously due to lack of volunteers, or their volunteers have limited areas of interest, which is totally understandable. But I think some basic automatic systems to at least add the new releases from major labels is needed for such database.

I personally have a better experience on https://musicbrainz.org/. It suffers the similar problem mentioned above, but much better. At least most of "mainstream" artists I checked, it has complete or close to complete discography. It is also a more "ambitious" database, which has data for each track, recording (my fav part), etc.

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A lot of (particularly older) music is on Discogs but not musicbrainz. Including much from africa, south america, etc. as well as blues, electronic, etc.

I think Discogs mainly caters to record collectors (vinyl etc.) which is not often covered by other sources. While honestly musicbrainz info is more common/shared.

>I think Discogs mainly caters to record collectors

This makes sense, I do have better experience when looking for vinyls, regardless of country of origin.

Still think they should at least have a basic dataset for newer CDs, though (to be fair, MusicBrainz's new music catalog is often lagged by a few months too.)

Discogs also contains digital releases.

However those are somewhat neglected by their user base. Digital releases are rarely even listed along with their physical counterparts on Discogs. Of course it's up to the users to actually create and maintain those entries.

>This is obviously due to lack of volunteers, or their volunteers have limited areas of interest, which is totally understandable. But I think some basic automatic systems to at least add the new releases from major labels is needed for such database.

They don't exist. Look at SoundExchange, the US organization that handles music royalties from streaming. They don't even have complete records on the releases for which they collect money! You're talking about a myriad of Hollywood-accounting companies (if that) that were fired up and dismantled willy-nilly, for decades.

Oh, that Japanese label that put out two 45s in 1962...where would that be recorded except in the collections of music fans who own them? That's what Discogs is based on. You want those records to be in the database? Buy them and put them in. The fact that you don't is what you're describing as "limited areas of interest."

Not sure what you mean by "don't exist". I meant that they could write scrapers and fetch such information periodically from, say, recording companies' websites or more reliably, from e-commerce stores.

I'm saying so because I know plenty of 3rd party fandom/crowdsourced databases are doing exactly this, for books, CDs, etc. The data obviously need some manual checks later, but this step saves lots of time.

Again, Discogs already have a very complete database for old releases, especially for vinyls. But what I'm talking is that they are lacking for newer ones (CDs or digital releases) and just provide a systematic (and tried) way to improve in that regard (considering their goal now is "everything").

For something in 1962? Sure you're right. But you don't really need some fans to own a copy to prove the existence or get information for a hit album in 2010s.

Discogs is fantastic for electronic music, though. Even quite old and obscure stuff, I don't recall ever not finding something.

Discogs started as an electronic music database, so it's not surprising.

I guess we can say that all these crowdsourced music databases have obvious priority or bias, despite they are appeared to, or want to, be a comprehensive one, which isn't very realistic just due to the sheer amount of the music produced. In Discogs' case, even though it gradually expanded to "everything", its strength is still at its core (where it started): electronic, hip-hop, rock, jazz, (in this order, named in the article), but probably not pop.

One probably would have much better luck looking for something in one than the other, totally depending on the genre. Like, if I'm looking for game music, I definitely will check VGMDB first.

Of course, it's not limited to music either. It can happen in much, much smaller fields. One particular case I want to mention is that there used to be three wikis for a single game, Dota 2, and each have their own strengths (there are still two today!).

I gave musicbraiz few chances in the past. To my disappointment, I was able to find maybe 20% of albums I wa looking for compared to discogs. And even if I found one, then it missed plenty of meta data that's available on discogs.

I had the same issue with musicbrainz but recently it seems to have much better metadata for my stuff. But usually between the two you can find what you are looking for.

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