A thousand contributions

Piles of compact discs

Last night I made my 1000th contribution to the Discogs database.

It’s a landmark achievement. One thousand new audio entries!

It’s also baffling why it took almost 12 years to get to this stage.

Bulk tape additions and stupid digital releases aside, for some reason I kept cherry-picking the interesting things to add from my stash — sometimes the challenging items, sometimes the easy ones — until this year where I’m rummaging through discs of the compact kind.

And then a certain number approached: Contribution 1000 just had to be special, so I hauled out this childhood sin. Check it out here. You can dance if you want to.

But what it was that really inspired me to write these words was this item:

Quintessential contribution #1001

A few years ago, when I requested tapes (for a project that still needs to be launched), I was given tapes. Many tapes. Lots of tapes and lots of records, and a good many CDs too.

This particular item I was wary of submitting at the time because it looked complex — being a combination of chamber music and poetry. Neither are quite my area of expertise, with lots of new artists and names and locations that didn’t exist in the database. Nor was there much to be found on the internet about this obscure flute ensemble… and who cares about a bunch of dead German poets?

Today those worries are unfounded as confidence and experience have made adding the CD’s metadata a piece of cake, bolstered by the fact that all the obscure poets mentioned now do well exist in the database courtesy of the efforts of untold numbers of equally metadata-mad users. We’ve come a long way.

And the ensemble itself? Well, they celebrated their 20th anniversary in January.

Most terrifying is the realisation that I’ve only just begun to add and review the stuff in my CD stash. Who knows what other strange coincidences and curious artefacts besides library records are waiting to be re-discovered in the basement archives.

Here’s to the next 1000!

Image credits: Photos and scans by hmvhDOTnet

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