With pressing plant entries and zillion live albums discogs is becoming a mess

I've noticed over the past year or so that the entries in discogs are becoming more and more noise over content for major artists.

For example, some people want to list every single pressing plant variant with the separate entry. Perhaps there's a usefulness to having this information, but there should be a better way of presenting it than overwhelming a discography with 10 different versions of the same single on the same label ussued at the same time in the same country.

Same thing with all these increasingly common massive live release programs where you'll have 10 or 20 live albums being released from a single tour. Some people feel the need to list each and every one of these, even in cases where they're only available as cdrs or digital downloads. For example, take a look at the Counting Crows discography, which is overwhelmed by digital live entries now.

More information is not bad, but there's got to be a better way of presenting it than intermingling it with all of the core elements of the discography. Various artists compilations that include a track from an artist are by default hidden, and something like that is probably called for now here too.

 

The blame falls at the feet of Discogs for not introducing new features and keeping up with the users. I assume they're making good money off their marketplace but they're not reinvesting it in tech.
One recent example: It took them days to be able to control a user who was image spamming high profile new releases with Nazi imagery.
They've even gone backwards over the past year, removing track linking because it was too strenuous on their servers.

As you said, "more information is not bad." Discogs needs to introduce features to allow the data to be presented in a better way. It's all possible. They just need to step up.

 

I would be happy if there was a way to eliminate cassettes from view.

 

Yeah, there should be toggles on the left for display of format and country... And the selections should be persistent.

 

When I buy something on Discogs, I always see if the seller has anything else I want, in order to save on shipping costs. Well, when Discogs can only display 250 items max on a page and the seller has a list of 20,000 items ...

 

Wish lists should be able to be filtered by location. Nothing worse than seeing my wish list clogged up with listings in locations I can’t and won’t buy from.

 

I don't see a problem at all. I *want* it to be that way!

 

I think it is annyoing for most sellers and many buyers.

 

If accurate, that'd likely be because most people don't care about having specific pressings but I do and that was the whole idea behind Discogs to begin with.

 

Yes, I know.

But the question is how to handle very small differences.

If I want to list a rather common title and have 20 different entries to chose it just gets too time-consuming.

 

The problem is not the database but the crappy tools they have to display it. Let's say you want to look at all the US vinyl releases of Van's "Moondance" dated 1970 by the uploader. With the "Find your version" tool it's easy to hack it down to nine entries, but you can't look at them as a group to buy or research. You have to click through them one by one.

 

Now many people care about the pressing plant used for a common 45 by an artist who is not particularly collectible? I don't need to see the 8 plants that pressed that 45 as separate entries. I imagine most people are like me.

It's not that I am opposed to that info being logged. But it should be hidden under a "variations" flag for the main 45 release.

 

On the plus side, the more matrix variations Discogs lists, the fewer people freaking out and starting inane threads on SH.tv because their specific pressing isn’t listed

 

You can mitigate against that when you are looking to buy.

Go to the master entry for that title and click the "vinyl and cd" button. That will list all versions for sale in the marketplace.

You can then use the filters on the left to filter down. It is limited e.g. you can't filter for just US pressings, but you can get pretty close and if you use the other filters to make smaller lists to go through rather than just one large one, it can speed things up. I find it easier to look at 5 lists with 5 items on each rather than one list with 25 sort of thing.

To look at each one and not necessarily buy, I just right click and use the "open link in new tab" option. Not the best but it works.

 

Discogs resists any limitation other than outright redundancy on users creating new listings. Of course discogs just wants to sell things so tha rules are always tilted in that direction. I do have sympathy for sellers trying to figure out which of 200 listings is their pressing or CD issue when they are selling it for $15. The cost benefit of that on their time is below zero. Even for artists that I am highly familiar with I find it tedious and sometimes baffling to wade through the listings. Also many listings have errors in them making it even more difficult. I must say that even Ebay is better because it forces users to post pictures of their item. With discogs you have to query every potential seller, all of whom have varying knowledge about the item and time to field all the requests.

Discogs could make it significantly easier by having separate pages for all label differences or matrix differences for an item. That way you could search on a particular label or matrix if that is what was important. However now such information is not required so some listings have it and some don't. Also there is no standardization of images. Thus searches are always incomplete.

This highlights the big problem that discogs makes it very easy to create a new item that is filled with mistakes and minimal information but very tedious to correct mistakes and add information. Again discogs wants to make it easy for a seller to sell something so they allow these continually proliferating listings as sellers try to game the system. Better to be the only seller of a particuar liusting than 1 of 200. I wonder when the whole discogs system will just lock up.

I have always felt that discogs should assign one subject matter expert for some set of listings to manage those listings. Discogs could set up some standard framework for them to follow. But at least you would have better organization of each artists catalog and someone knowledgeable enough to respond to issues.

 

Most people may disagree with me but I think that Discogs detail and "mess" is a feature not a bug.
Record collectors are by nature obsessive and If someone else is willing to document these records and CDs to the Nth degree, I say, "more power to them"
If it results in keeping the greedy middlemen out of the hobby, because it becomes unviable to dig into the details, then that can only be a good thing.
Meanwhile the real obsessive collectors can track down that elusive pressing at a fairer price.

 

You think a smaller supply will help to lower the prices? Interesting concept ...

 

The supply won't be any smaller, the same number of records and CDs will be out there for real collectors to find. Hopefully at a lower price due to the lack of a middleman's mark-up.

 

So a collector from USA or Japan will find them in my basement? You are right, they will be still in existence, but not available for music listeners and collectors all over the world.

In many cases we are talking about CD in the 5-10 Euros/dollars price range. The expensive stuff will be offered internationally anyway.

 

I find it pretty easy to correct mistakes or add missing information. I do it often enough. It's a lot less tedious than adding a new entry into the database, though you can reduce that tedium by creating a copy of another entry and altering it as required.

 

It is sort of a mess to have to wade through so many variations to look at basically the same release when trying to find one to buy. On the other hand, I have somewhat enjoyed becoming familiar with the various pressing plant indicators that the major labels used back in the 60's and 70's. Kind of fun details to know, but yes, they should have an aggregation of multiple pressings of the the same release if you want to view each release as one entry.

 

Here's an example. I just want to look through the main studio album releases by Counting Crows. I have to scroll through two pages to see the five albums, because the listing is overwhelmed by nonsense from Nugs.net and other live ephemera:

https://www.discogs.com/artist/262643-Counting-Crows

This is out of control.

 

I’ve come across albums on Discogs with several US pressings listed, for instance, with nothing noted to differentiate one pressing from another. Why even bother making multiple listings for an album if they aren’t going to say what makes one listing different from another?

 

Yes, and also so many generic entries without year of issue or any meaningful details. I wonder if a seller creates these to list an item when they have a matrix that does not match all the variants listed and aren’t certain of the pressing.

 

I think this captures it. I am with @Strat-Mangler in that Discogs began as a database and that remains a primary value of the site - it has to aim for completeness, and it has to catalogue differences that might be meaningful to collectors.

What Discogs could do - and what it has been pretty consistently awful at - is give users the ability to filter and sort information in more useful ways.

The ability to filter Want List email notifications has been the number-one most requested feature for many years now, and they simply refuse to do it. They implemented the ability to search comments and do other advanced searching of one's collection - and then de-activated it.

It is possible to filter artists' discographies by media type, either by sorting the list that way or by using the "Find My Version" function - but the results are still visually a mess and hard to sort through. There's no way they could not improve this if they hired a couple of full-time programmers to do it.

Similarly, the Country tag on releases is a total mess because it's meant to be the country of intended distribution and not manufacture. For tons of 1980s CDs, not to mention any modern LP pressed by, say, Pallas, this creates a nightmare when you try to search for it. (Plus for a lot of releases, how are the volunteers/fans creating the entries supposed to know if "US," "US and Canada," or "North America" is the correct country tag? Ditto for "Europe" or "UK and Europe" - it's not alway known.) If they had two Country tags - one for release country and one for manufacturing/pressing country - it would help.

Ditto for Release Year - how many LP and CD pressings are there in the database where the general time period or date range iss known with certainty but there's no exact year - like an early CD that had to have been pressed between 1985 and 1987, or an IFPI CD that must be post-1993, or an LP repress that's definitely from the 1970s? If they permitted date ranges it would prevent situations where an album might have 200 entries and 100 or more of them are pressings over a span of 40-50 years, all mixed up together and unsortable because they have no exact Release Year and so they are forbidden from having any Release Year tag at all.

So I think it's the available tags and filtering options that are the issue, not the inclusion of releases that one particular person might think are unimportant.