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Discogs Turns Record Collectors' Obsessions Into Big Business
HughPickens.com writes:
Ben Sisario writes at the NYT that Discogs has built one of the most exhaustive collections of discographical information in the world, and with 24 million items for sale, (eBay's music section lists 11 million) Discogs is on track to do nearly $100 million in business by the end of the year. One of Discog's secrets is the use of Wikipedia's model of user-generated content with historical data cataloged by thousands of volunteer editors in extreme detail. The site's entry for the Beatles' White Album, for instance, contains 309 distinct versions of the record, including its original releases in countries like Uruguay, India and Yugoslavia — in mono and stereo configurations — and decades of reissues, from Greek eight-tracks to Japanese CDs. "There's a record-collector gene," says Kevin Lewandowski. "Some people want to know every little detail about a record."
The site, once run from a computer in Lewandowski's closet and originally restricted to electronic music, has grown rapidly. "It took about six months working nights and weekends on Discogs, and I launched it in November 2000. It was very simplistic compared to what it is now, but it started growing right away." Discogs now has 37 employees around the world, 20 million online visitors a month and three million registered users. Lewandowski, who is the sole owner of Discogs, says he had no interest in selling the business. He has watched other players enter the field over the last 15 years, including Amazon, which in 2008 introduced SoundUnwound, a Wikipedia-like site for music that was quietly shut down four years later. Discogs may have survived because of the innovation of its marketplace, giving collectors an incentive to expand the database with every imaginable detail. "I want it to go on forever," says Lewandowski.
The site, once run from a computer in Lewandowski's closet and originally restricted to electronic music, has grown rapidly. "It took about six months working nights and weekends on Discogs, and I launched it in November 2000. It was very simplistic compared to what it is now, but it started growing right away." Discogs now has 37 employees around the world, 20 million online visitors a month and three million registered users. Lewandowski, who is the sole owner of Discogs, says he had no interest in selling the business. He has watched other players enter the field over the last 15 years, including Amazon, which in 2008 introduced SoundUnwound, a Wikipedia-like site for music that was quietly shut down four years later. Discogs may have survived because of the innovation of its marketplace, giving collectors an incentive to expand the database with every imaginable detail. "I want it to go on forever," says Lewandowski.
Discogs survived because it is mostly run by people who do this out of a passion for music. SoundUnwound was run by people with a passion for money.
This is why Adds are bad. When money determines the faith of websites, it makes the rise of new enthusiast websites difficult. They are just to hard to find in the background noise.
Having never heard of Discogs before, it basically sounds like it's like MusicBrainz with more data. Is that about right?
I'm always uneasy with helping private, for-profit entities fill a database with publicly-available information (e.g. Amazon-owned IMDb), since there's generally very little stopping them from taking it all private and locking it behind a paywall in the future. If a site is asking its users to assume the responsibility to generate and maintain the data, as is the case with these publicly-maintained databases, there should be protections in place ensuring that the data remains in the hands of the users. Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and other non-profit projects do a great job of cataloging public information, and they do so with the backing of organizations and foundations whose primary purpose is to maintain the projects for their own sake, rather than to turn a profit.
I'm normally not an "information wants to be free" sort of guy, but apparently I am when it comes to this sort of information.
Back In The USSR ... and probably more if you check the track listing. One? Really?
Dear Prudence
Happiness Is A Warm Gun
Blackbird
Julia
Helter Skelter
Good Night
Prospective buyers simply haven't waved a large enough check yet. Sooner or later they will, and the community that made the site a success will get screwed. It wouldn't be the first time, nor the last.
Beets (a command line music tagger and basic player) can use MusicBrainz and Discogs to correctly tag your music library
http://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html
http://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/plugins/discogs.html
I love discogs for buying weird obscure vinyl but their rating/chart database is very poor for trying to get recommendations for new music.
Rateyourmusic.com's charts are excellent for that (and is run by a small 2 man team).
They're in the last day of their indiegogo campaign to improve/launch a new site. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sonemic-cinemos-glitchwave/#/
Ben Sisario writes at the NYT that Discogs has built one of the most exhaustive collections of discographical information in the world
Time for an obligatory xkcd. .
And for future web searches of the guy's name, the NYT writer, Ben Sisario, is a lazy brainless dumbass.
There's four links in the summary and no actual link to Discogs itself.
Birthday
Revolution 1
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Discogs is part of your everyday life if you are a record collector. I find a lot info about Jazz Records, Punk Records, rare pressings, songs, demos, certain etches in the vinyl, how many were made, etc. Even your friends ******* record they put out themselves in the 90's is probably on there.
[The White Album] had exactly one track worth listening to
Yeah, but don't you think it was a bit audience-pandering of them to edit it down to a mere eight and a half minutes?
and making random idiots rich? if you see a website/app/service that skims a % profit for doing something trivial don't fucking use it! all this shit can be decentralized and run at cost.
If you're a Beatles fan you should try listening to Howard Stern interview Donovan. He was teaching John and Paul how to play different guitar styles while in India.
discogs is one of my favorite websites ever. it's like an all-text, informational and educational youtube, except this one stores and categorizes large caches of music purposely instead of incidentally.
my favorite things to do would be to either browse their genre tags for interesting-looking music for hours at a time, or look up an album i loved and click on the label it was published to where i'd typically find many more similarly inspiring artists. i found countless bands through discogs itself, and i've bought dozens of records & CDs i fell in love with through them (i prefer finding them new however.) back in the dark ages of missing CD-Text info for relatively unknown bands; when gracenote would fail me, discogs was a godsend as a one-stop place for filling in all that information.
over the years as my tastes started to broaden, the music i wanted to hear became more obscure, branching off into east-asian continents. unfortunately they are missing a lot of international music i liked. a lot of music originating from eastern nations and everywhere in-between. from when i first started browsing around 2005 they have branched out a lot, but there is quite a lot that still can't be found on discogs because nobody bothered to submit it. if they gain foothold in more international markets they'd most assuredly become one of the more powerful second hand music sales businesses on the planet. they already have the interface translated in six languages, all they need now is the interest.
discogs could be asking other websites that catalog such obscure music information for convergence, but i doubt this would work neatly into discogs _very_ particular article submission/approval system. it'd really take all the undying love for music of an international fanbase to help them branch out. i'd love to see discogs grow as they've been very influential in my life and i think it should continue growing to be an influential, public database of information and direct-from-seller access for purchasing physical music for the rest of humanity.