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Category Archives: Metadata
20 years of Discogs
I’ve been a member of discogs.com for two decades. Today, Discogs sees mention in publications like Forbes, the Financial Times, the Guardian or the New York Times — although mostly in connection with its marketplace and the items that sell for ludicrous amounts — but not necessarily always in a good light. A higher profile comes at the cost of attracting scammers, spammers, fraudsters and hackers who have taken to targeting the site for their own malicious needs. Complaints from buyers about not receiving the exact version or in the advertised condition as well as fee hikes due to post-pandemic inflation now make the biggest waves. Continue reading →
Posted in Internet, Metadata, Music
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Tagged anniversary, collecting, community, compulsion, database, discogs, OCD, research, wasted youth
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My 2021 in music scrobbles
While we’re on a roll with music and metadata, let’s throw coronavirus and statistics into the mix. What I did do was scrobble the metadata embedded within a stash of local MP3 files — usually playing “100 random songs” as background music while going on with my salaried work or other activities. Last.fm has a personal profile on me. This post is about distorted data and false analyses. Continue reading →
Posted in Metadata
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Tagged 2021, data mining, fake news, geek porn, insights, music, music industry, statistics
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The ISRC conundrum
Furthering the previous article on music metadata, today I’d like to describe my recent observations about ISRCs. It’s a 12-character, alphanumeric code that aims to uniquely identify a sound recording — irrespective whether it’s a song, spoken word, or a music video. According to the official handbook, a song’s album version will have a different ISRC to, for instance, a radio edit or a dance remix. Knowing the ISRC and understanding its implementation can be useful in identifying and differentiating between versions of a song recording. This was important to me last year when I set out to “archive” a batch of CDs (mostly singles and promos). Continue reading →
Posted in Metadata
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Tagged CD, database, geek porn, music, music industry, standardisation
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Music. Meta. Madness.
In December I had to give a presentation on a topic of my choice. Predictably, the topic I picked involved Discogs. At first I considered simply showcasing some Venn diagrams or random insights and fun facts gleaned from its raw data but, alas, it turns out that data is only interesting if it has more than one dimension. Prose is not data. Discogs isn’t exactly “Big Data” either. Privacy was another aspect worth diving into. But at the very heart of this contentious data there was a message I could easily convey: Where does it come from, and why is much of it garbage? Continue reading →
Posted in Metadata
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Tagged AI, credits, data capture, data mining, database, discogs, geek porn, guidelines, madness, media, metadata, music industry, norms, schema, standardisation
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The management of projects
There are projects, and then there are projects. There are projects that reveal themselves as mere tasks. Then there are the ongoing projects: responsibilities and maintenance tasks that you take on for reasons important to nobody but your own delusion of “the greater good”. One of these is my “SA labels” project at Discogs. Continue reading →
Posted in Metadata
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Tagged discogs, OCD, planning, projects, research, time management
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Statistics, analytics and trends
On February 1st, 2017 my first website finally went 404. Its host, arcor.de, shut down. Nonetheless, in its 15 years online the site allowed me to observe a shift in online users’ behaviour and trends. Here are a few observations based on the final statistics before the site went dark. Continue reading →
(O)CD 2016
Most of last year was spent listening, scanning, typing, and checking. A certain monster had gotten hungry again, and there were several boxes of morsels stashed away in the basement.
The morsels were my “secondary CD collection”, and the monster is known as discogs.com. All in all I rummaged through some 300 discs, and I also added several records, tapes and downloadables. Once more, I got to explore new music by listening to old recordings. Gratis. Continue reading →