Discogs
From Free net encyclopedia
Image:Discogs.Logo.png Discogs (discogs.com), short for discographies, is a website and database of information about music recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and certain bootleg or off-label releases. The discogs.com servers are owned by "Zink Media, Inc." and are located in Portland, Oregon, USA.
Discogs is one of the largest online databases of electronic music releases and is believed to be the largest online database of releases on vinyl media. Across all genres and formats, over 500,000 releases are catalogued. It also features listings for over 340,000 artists and over 45,000 labels. The site has around 100,000 visitors a day.
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History
Discogs was started in October 2000 (the domain was already registered in August 2000) by Kevin Lewandowski — programmer, DJ, and music fan as a database of his private record collection.
He was inspired by the success of community built sites such as Slashdot, eBay and Open Directory Project, and decided to use this model for a music discography database.
The site's original goal was to build the most comprehensive database of electronic music, organized around the artists, labels, and releases available in that genre. In 2003 the Discogs system was completely rewritten (Version 2), and in January 2004 it began to support other genres, starting with hip hop. Since then, it has expanded to include rock and jazz in January 2005 and funk/soul, latin and reggae in October of the same year. In January 2006 blues and non-music were added.
On June 30 2004, Discogs published its last report, which included information about the number of its contributors. This report claims that Discogs has 15,788 contributors and 260,789 releases [1].
Lewandowski plans to make the data in Discogs available in convenient formats such as XML, but until then, the site's data is only accessible via the HTML interface and is intended to be viewed only using web browsers; attempts to "screen scrape" or use other automated means to interact with Discogs are expressly forbidden. [2]
Contribution system
The data in Discogs comes from submissions contributed by users who have registered accounts on the site. There is a group of privileged users, called moderators, who vote on whether each submission should be accepted or rejected. A smaller group of users, called editors, have higher privileges and can approve certain changes to existing information.
Discogs uses a point system to rank users based on the number and type of approved submissions. Users with higher rank are allowed to make more submissions.
Submitting releases is a complex process, starting from the input of various data upon the release to checking for errors within that data. The time it takes for a release to go from submission to an approved release can vary from a few days to over a month. [3]
Copyright
The Discogs website and its aggregate collection of compiled data are subject to copyright (to the extent that copyright applies to a database and web site consisting of public contributions) and a terms of use agreement, information about which is on the site.