Music Database Discogs

20.09.2010 | Dennis Wiesch

Have you ever desperately searched for detailed information or complete discographies of certain artists, albums or labels? Have you ever wanted to know for exaple which productions Wayne Shorter was involved in (except his own of course)? The music platform »Discogs« offers exactly this service.

Discogs was founded in the year 2000 and was originally conceived as a private database for the record collection of its founder Kevin Lewandowski. He then had the idea of opening this portal to the public. You can register free of charge, are not entering into any form of commitment and have various options.

For example you can set up and administer your own collection as well as your private search list. If one of your records is not listed in Discogs you can enter it yourself (following a certain set of parameters). In this way the database is growing continuously according to the activity of its members. All entries are checked and approved by moderators.

Since four years Discogs also offers the possibility to buy and sell audio media. Far more comfortably than with e-bay you can post your records, enter a fixed price and just wait until someone buys it. And if you wish you receive a daily mail from Discogs in which all currently sold records of your search list are listed. I have so far made no bad experience with Discogs. All sellers are really friendly and reliable and records and CDs were all in the condition as advertised.

Discogs is also a great tool to do research with. Lets stick to the Wayne Shorter example: apart from getting a list of all his published records, you can also find out in which albums of other artists he participated, on which compilations he is present, which labels published his music in what year and which albums he maybe also produced.

Originally Discogs was an internet portal for electronic music like house or techno. Meanwhile, through the dazzling increase of members and visitors of the website (approx. 200.000 per day), you can find a lot of listed audio media from all sorts of genres like jazz, world music and pop. The number of listed media is increasing daily, the current status is 1.7 Million CDs and records.

Finally I would also like to recommend the Discogs forum. Here you can contact other members, ask questions, discuss topics and hear loads of interesting news. For example, there’s a thread where all kinds of record shops in several cities (including adress and genre) are listed.