Official Blog
May 22, 2012
The Echo Nest and Discogs Deliver Crowdsourced Music Data to Apps
We're excited to announce The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering smarter apps across the web and devices, has incorporated Discogs into its Rosetta Stone platform, a universal music data translator that facilitates "big data" integration into apps on all platforms.
As part of the deal, Discogs' rich database of user-generated music information -- one of the largest sources of music information in the world, especially for electronic and vinyl releases -- is seamlessly incorporated into The Echo Nest's Rosetta Stone. This allows developers to access all of that data at a deep level, safe in the knowledge that they're matching the appropriate artists on Twitter, Facebook, or Spotify (more partners listed below) to Discogs' extensive information on music releases.
The Echo Nest's Rosetta Stone also hooks into Discogs' marketplace, where music fans buy and sell music on any physical format. With Discogs' artists mapped into Rosetta Stone, app developers can include in their apps not only Discogs' information on millions of releases, but releases offered for sale in the marketplace.
Developers can now access release dates, artist credits, labels, album covers, marketplace inventory, and more, for any artist on Discogs, and match that to the artists on any or every other Rosetta Stone platform, offering potential for never-before-seen music apps.
In addition to Discogs, The Echo Nest's Rosetta Stone includes 7Digital, EMI, Facebook, Free Music Archive, JamBase, LyricFind, Musicbrainz, MusixMatch, Playme, Rdio, Seatwave, Songkick, SongMeanings, Spotify, and Twitter.
May 3, 2012
Top 30 Most Expensive Items Sold by Month
Today we're kicking off a new series of monthly blog posts featuring a list of the Top 30 Most Expensive Items sold through the Discogs Marketplace. This months list is for items sold in March 2012. Items are only included in these lists if the seller received payment. Prices are converted to $USD based on exchange rates at the time of sale.
Since it has been a couple of years since we posted the Top 100 Most Expensive Records list, we thought it would be fun go back and create Top 30 lists for the past 2 years. One interesting thing we noticed was the genre for the number one spot has shifted from Electronic over time. In 2010, 47% of the releases in these lists were in the Electronic genre. In 2011, Funk/Soul and Rock each hit the number one spot 25% of the time, with Electronic dropping to 8%.
Do you see any interesting patterns in these lists? Let us know by posting in the comments.
November 21, 2011
Artist/Release Videos for Mobile
Bonus: If you own an iPhone+Airport, you can also stream the videos via AirPlay to your speakers.
November 1, 2011
API v2.0 Improvements
Hey developers! Remember when we launched the Discogs API and you were like "this is really great, now I can programmatically read data from the Discogs database!"
Yes, those were good times. And, sure, reading is great -- but writing is even better. Today, we're proud to announce the second half of the API.
Your applications can now authenticate on behalf of a Discogs user with OAuth -- a way of securely allowing users to give applications access to their account without giving up their password. Using the new endpoints and HTTP methods like POST, PUT, and DELETE, you can:
- read user profiles
- manage your collections and wantlists, including folders and notes
- rate releases
- manage your seller inventory
- and even create new listings on the marketplace.
We've also reworked our existing endpoints:
- URLs use plural nouns and IDs rather than names where possible
- Responses contain URLs to other related API endpoints
- Many collections of objects (e.g. artist's releases) now support pagination
- New database search endpoint supports more powerful filtering and returns more structured data (instead of "hey, here's a huge blob of text!")
But don't feel overwhelmed: we're also releasing some comprehensive new documentation, and we'll keep answering your questions in the API Forums.
We'll also be at Music Hack Day in Boston, a weekend-long hackathon focused on music-themed projects. We'll be giving a workshop and offering a $500 prize for best use of the Discogs API.
Finally, a reminder: the old API v1 methods are due to be shut off on December 15th, so if you've got an application that still uses them, you should switch over as soon as you can. Plus, look at all the enticing new stuff in v2.
November 1, 2011
Discogs Marketplace Quick Lister
Today we're announcing a new listing interface for selling items in the Discogs Marketplace, that we've been calling the "quick lister". It allows you to search for an item you want to sell, find the correct item, view sales history, see how many people want and have the item, then complete the listing all on a single page. This means you can spend less time clicking around and more time getting your inventory in front of buyers.
We're also planning on adding a file upload option to the Quick Lister in the coming weeks, that will offer sellers with large inventories an easy way of creating exact matches between their items and releases in the Discogs database.
Try it out and let us know what you think!
http://www.discogs.com/sell
September 28, 2011
New Filtering Options Added to Discogs Marketplace
New options include:
* Year of Release
* Ships From Country
* Make an Offer (show items where seller accepts offers)
* Format Descriptions (e.g., 7", 10", 12", Picture Disc, Album, etc)
* Select multiple filters within some categories (e.g., Style: House + Techno)
Now go find yourself some 7" picture discs from sellers in Germany.
August 29, 2011
Label And Companies Update - August 2011
This system has been created after some discussion (ok, lots...) about the way to correctly catalog all the various entities involved in the release. It is intended that this will make submitting easier, as you don't have to worry about whether or not it is permitted to enter a certain entity - you can enter them all. It also means that we can start properly cataloging things like recordings that were made at Abbey Road Studios - another way to find music you may like.
In terms of voting, we'd like to request that voters take a 'soft' approach to the use of the tags, especially in problematic or difficult examples. The most important thing is the link goes to the correct page. Only vote "Needs Minor Changes" at the most if an entity should be a series instead of a label, a record company instead of a licensee, etc. Sometimes, these things are not explicitly defined on the release, and we can't expect all submitters to be experts on such matters, or to spend a lot of time researching things.
At the moment, these new tags will still point to pages with the URL http://www.discogs.com/label/ , and there will be references to 'Label'. We plan to continue to update things as we start to see data getting entered with the new tags.
More discussion on this update available here.
June 24, 2011
Thanks Open Source Bridge
We attended the various sessions this week and enjoyed learning and hanging out with other developers and systems people.
Thanks to the organizers for putting together a great conference! We're looking forward to another Open Source Bridge in 2012!
June 7, 2011
API v2.0
Some of the major changes:
- The API uses a new url: api.discogs.com
- An API key is no longer required
- We have removed the 5,000 requests per day limit*
- We are offering an official Python API client. Check it out on github. Feel free to fork it and submit pull requests. You can help us improve it!
- Responses are returned in JSON format now. You can still request XML if you prefer that.
- JSONP support
We are phasing out the old API and it will be shut down on Dec 15, 2011. We will email all users with an API key asking them to migrate to the new version.
February 23, 2011
Exploring Discogs
Do you have a hard time finding J-Pop releases on vinyl? Maybe you want to give Viking Metal or Emo, Thug Rap a try, but just don't know where to start. However popular or obscure your musical preferences, the new explore page on Discogs can help you slice and dice the over 2.3 million releases in our database into a much smaller and relevant collection of releases, videos, lists, and reviews based on your superb taste in music.