Between the Beats

Are you familiar with the feeling of searching desperately for detailed information and full discographies on certain artists, records or labels on the internet? For example, other than his own, what productions has Wayne Shorter been involved in? The music database ‘Discogs‘ is the perfect solution for this!

Discogs was created in 2000. It’s original purpose was to be a personal database for its owner, Kevin Lewandowski, to list his own private record collection. After receiving lots of very positive feedback, it quickly became clear that he should share this website and allow public access. Now anyone can register easily and free of charge and there are lots of useful options.

Firstly, you can create your own profile with your personal collection and wantlist. If you notice that one of your records is missing from the Discogs database, you can submit it yourself and so the database grows continuously throught the activity of its members. The submissions are monitored by a few people who have voting permissions.

Secondly, for the last four years Discogs has offered the possibility to buy and sell records. It can be much easier than sites like Ebay - rather than bidding process, you choose your price and list it until someone buys at that price. You pay a small fee of around 5% to Discogs for every item you sell. Discogs sends out a daily, personalised newsletter which shows all items for sale that appear on your wantlist. Personally, I have always had very good experiences using this. The sellers have all been friendly and reliable and the records have arrived in the condition specified.

Thirdly, Discogs gives you the opportunity to do alot of research on artists. Let’s keep Wayne Shorter as our example. As well as a detailed list of all of his records including release dates, you can find alot of other artist’s records in which he participated, which he might have produced or compilations on which he appears.

At first, Discogs was a database purely for electronic music like House and Techno, but it has evolved over the years through the growing number of memberships, registrations and visitors (currently around 200 000 per day!). And now you can also find good selections of other genres such as Jazz, Blues, World Music and Pop. Right now, over 1.7 million recording mediums are listed!

Finally, there is the Discogs forum, which is called ‘Groups’ on Discogs. Here, you can contact other users, ask questions, get track identifications and discuss alot of different topics. One very special thread, for example, is a collection of alot of cities around the globe with a list of all record stores for each city with address and genre (International Record Store Index).

Tags: Discogs, Ebay, forum, Kevin Lewandowski, music database, recording mediums, Wayne Shorter

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