[M-Mu] Why I Despise Discogs (and Why I’ll Keep Using It)

Whose your favorite musical artist/band ? Bet you that no matter how huge of a fan you are, you couldn't name everything they've done, and I think that's honestly a shame. But, it's also the nature of performative art like music, it's hard to encapsulate everything by an artist, a group, anything ever. The site Discogs...tries ? It's invaluable, but, may I tell you about all my problems with it ?



Discogs is an extremely useful site for what it offers. The problem with tracking whole discographies is, it often has to be done by either fans, or collectors. While a site like Wikipedia should serve an identical purpose in theory, they care a bit too much about information being important, while Discogs takes my preferred approach to heart, and assumes all information ever is important, down to the barcode #, the matrix code and SID #, who published it, info on if a track is mislabeled, the region it was released in, all with a comments section for each unique version of an album. In theory, this sounds nothing short of incredible, but the more you search, the more noticeable the flaws become. Because this site is both a dumpster fire and invaluable, here's everything wrong with it, and how I'd fix it.

Before this train wreck begins, I'd also like to shout out The Metal Archives as a far better way of handling this kind of information. It's far from perfect or as extensive, but it's often slept on.



Pearl Jam is a pretty well known name, but...they haven't put out 573 ALBUMS...have they ? Well yes and no, while also definitely being no but kinda sorta. Confusing, right ? They've done an absolutely insane amount of live shows, and released "Official Live Bootlegs" (in the music scene, a bootleg is just a fan recording of a live concert, and shoutout to the amazing oxymoron of having an official bootleg) for each year, since 2000. The number for this is easily in the triple digits, explaining most of those releases, but not all.

What makes this all the more annoying, is that promos, single release cassettes, compilations, actual bootlegs get piled into the same area as the mainline studio releases. You can filter out the 401 "Compilations" to only look at albums they've appeared on instead, but said albums are still muddied with radio transcriptions, samplers, unofficial releases...it becomes a problem if it being both too known, and horrendously organized, so it's just a complete information overload. You can scroll down to the page's comments to see how truly infamous this complete mess is, and this is often a problem for extremely well known artists, information overload onto a system that doesn't handle it from the very start.

What would solve this in the short term is to sort by total versions of a release, as studio albums get re-released a lot, but it's a damp cloth on a bullet wound. How I'd fix this is to define very clearly what a studio album is, and have that be the only category put front and center, then have very specific categories for each release type. Is it a sampler ? Have that be it's own grouping you can exclude from searches, or only search that. Same with live, radio, anything.



Another thing that always makes scouring for the most definitive version of an album a migraine is, within an album's release, everything is still a wreck. Unofficial releases are given equal weight to official ones, and there's no way to create an exclusion for albums that are unofficial. A studio album and an unofficial one someone just made one day are both Albums, and the most annoying part is, there's also no way of sorting by how many tracks appear on the album. So, if I want to find the one singular deluxe edition of an album, or Japanese album with a bonus track I and possibly a lot of other people haven't heard, I have to open every single release manually, and check each one. Shoutout to last week's entry bringing this problem front and center to me, and inspiring this post.



This one irks me more than it actually outright irritates and inconveniences me; If something is released on Bandcamp, it makes the assumption that it's released as MP3 320kbps first, when Bandcamp allows for FLAC downloads when you purchase a track or album. But this only happens...sometimes, almost arbitrarily. Now this post is already pushing me WAY over time, and I can't get into it right now, but Bandcamp will not allow you to upload in a format that isn't lossless. There's an argument to be made that I think Discogs is trying to do, for when an artist creates in MP3, converts it to FLAC or WAV, but it's still clear that the final product wasn't made for any lossless container.

The only thing I'd do here is simply say it's a digital release, trying to nail down whether it was lossy or lossless if it's specifically on Bandcamp only is a bit futile and pointless, as Bandcamp will always offer a lossless file. The whole argument for and against lossless is...a strangely heated one within the music community, and one that is outside the scope of this current blog entry. I'll talk about it one day, but not today.



Arguably the biggest positive thing they (allegedly) do is support local music selling stores by allowing them to sell the specific release of an album on-site. The downside is...the sorting system is miserable. When you sort by price, it won't factor in shipping costs, which aren't even accurate. eBay figured this out before I was even born, and it means that the sort by price feature does, effectively nothing, while also being a larger hub of physical music stores selling things online, making Discog's claim accurate, but moot.

Also listen to Angles, it's a great album.



To try and wrap this post up that took way more time to write than I was expecting, I want to say that Discogs probably isn't meant to be like a Wikipedia of music, but instead a place for collectors to prove their collections, which simply isn't my crowd. Case in point is there always being a "Most Expensive Releases Sold This Month" right on the front page, and most discussion of albums being the quality of a vinyl pressing. Me personally, growing up in poverty means the things you can choose to collect are a lot more limited. It's why I love the underground music sharing scene, why I love archiving things that are simply available now but could disappear one day, and why I care this much to write about a website for what feels like far too long.



I could've written a lot more than what's contained in this post, but if me rambling about music is gonna be a weekly thing, I'd rather save the steam for next time. This post already went way over time, but I want to thank you for reading regardless, I enjoy writing these quite a bit, and don't plan to stop if I can help it.

(2023-5-22 Update: Fixed broken Imgur links, migrated to imgbb, and added [M-Mu] tag)