Take 69,000 contributors and let them loose on the record stores and collections of the world and you wind up with something that looks like Discogs. The world’s largest open database of music announced yesterday that they had just added their 11 millionth unique release to the catalog.
Surprisingly, this came just 9 months after passing the 10 million mark, suggesting an exponential growth. “Top put that in context,” a blog post notes, “the first million releases took 90 months” to add to Discogs’ database.
The increasing focus on international records (Africa, Central America, South America and Asia) is one reason for the growth:
While Discogs is widely regarded as a place for listing vinyl, CDs, cassettes and other physical media, the site covers digital-only music too. It seems unlikely Discogs will ever overcome an insurmountable backlog of unlisted tracks from the digital-only sphere, though. In the 9 months it took Discogs to add 1 million records, for instance, Spotify may have added as many as 5 million songs to their database. Spotify founder Daniel Ek stated that the service is adding some 20,000 new songs to its library every day, and what took Discogs 9 months to add, a second-tier streaming service like Napster adds in six weeks.
