Discogs Hits Data Milestone With 8.5M Releases, 5M Artists, 1M Labels
The crowdsourced data the online music marketplace generates is all on the upswing, which helps explain why Ticketfly recently integrated the platform's artist data into its back end,
Discogs, the online music marketplace that trades predominantly in vinyl, today announced three seven-digit database milestones: five million artists, one million labels and 8.5 million releases.
“At the heart of the Discogs database is our amazing group of contributors.” said Ron Rich the platform’s marketing director, in a statement referencing the platform’s 355,000 active contributors over the past month. “As they cultivate data from their collections, continue tracking their records through the Discogs App, it’s nothing short of incredible.”
One sign of the value of Discog’s data was its recent integration this past April into the backend of Pandora’s Ticketfly ticketing platform that increased its artist database from some 200,000 to 5 million. Discogs with its open API provides the data for free.
“Discogs has built an amazing depth of artist information that makes planning and booking events easier than ever for our venue and promoter partners,” said Ticketfly’s principle product manager Brad Hubbard in a statement. “When we evaluated data partners, Discogs stood out as the best option for us.”
And according Discogs, the platform is acquiring its crowd-sourced data at a faster rate than ever. It added 612K artists in 2015, 672K artists in 2016 and thus far for 2017 it has 372K—well on its way to over 800K for the year. The same holds true for it label data as over the past two years it has grown from 163K to 187K and is already at 123K for 2017 putting it on pace for more than 250K for the year. And while Discogs hit five million releases in 2015, it has only taken two years for the database to reach 8.5 million releases
Discogs was founded by then-Intel programmer Kevin Lewandowski in 2000, who started it as a hobby to catalog his collection of electronic albums for which he cross-referenced artists, releases and labels. The site slowly became a user-generated, wiki-like database. The platform experimented with ad revenue, paid subscription and membership models before 2007 when it added a marketplace feature whereby users could buy and sell vinyl which was when the platform began to take off.
In October the growing concern acquired the Crate Diggers franchise, a live event where Discogs users and others can interface in real time and revel to various DJs and performers while purchasing vinyl. In April the platform launched Gearogs, a site trading in audio gear, like turntables, speakers, mixers, headphones, synthesizers, effects pedals and more.
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While Discogs declined to discuss its revenues, Billboard estimated that in 2016 the platform broke the $100 million sales threshold. And with a business model similar to eBay or Amazon with the site taking 8 percent of sales, Discogs would have generated some $8 million in revenues last year. Certainly its revenues this year are on course to surpass that amount.
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