The data about records is spectacularly clean. Compare it to Ebay, where the data is scattershot, and you have something quite different and reusable. It is the best parts of musicbrainz, CDDB, and Ebay– where users can catalog their collections and buy/sell records. By starting with the community function, Kevin said, the quality started out really good, and then adding the market place later led it to its success.
But there is something else Discogs does that sets it whatsapp lead apart from many other commercial websites, and this makes All The Difference:
Discogs also makes their data available, in bulk, and with a free-to-use API.
The Great 78 Project has leveraged this bulk database to help find the date of release for 78’s. Just yesterday, I downloaded the new dataset and added it to our 78rpm date database, and in last year 10’s of thousands more 78’s were added to discogs, and we found 1,500 more dates for our existing 78’s. Thank you!
l Project leverages the API’s by looking up records we will be digitizing tofind track listings.
A donor to our CD project used the public price information to appraise the CDs he donated for a tax write-off.
We want to add links back from Discogs to the Internet Archive and they have not allowed that yet (please please), but there is always something more to do.
I hope other sites, even commercial ones, would allow bulk access to their data (an API is not enough).
Rudolph Valentino stars in the 1925 film “The Eagle.” On January 1, 2021, this film and many more will enter the public domain.