Discogs Collection Statistics

Exploring the Most Collected and Coveted Records

Discogs is a user built database and marketplace for recorded music. Many collectors, dj's and other music enthusiasts use the site to catalogue and keep track of their record collection and wantlist. A compilation of these want and have statistics can be found for every release on Discogs.

On this page I've gathered data on the 250 most collected and coveted music releases on Discogs. Hopefully it will provide insight into questions like: how many users have added each release to their collection? Who are the artists and bands behind these recordings? Where do they come from? When did these releases come out and which genres and styles do they belong to?

You can look at the most collected records overall or select from to a handful of my favourite styles and genres. Click the menu for more options and information. I hope you enjoy it.

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Outro

I hope this summary of the most collected Discogs releases was informative and entertaining to you. Thanks to the Discogs and MusicBrainz user communities for their tireless work on cataloguing the worlds music. The code used to collect and visualize this data can be found on Github. If you see any bugs or inconsistencies in the data you can let me know on @karltryggvason on Twitter or send me an email ktryggvason@gmail.com

Some words on the methodology: This page uses the master releases on Discogs. This is the abstract idea of a release, how you probably think of an album or a single. The one that ties together all the different physical editions on Discogs, such as CD releases, vinyl versions, cassettes and other more esoteric formats. For instance 45 versions of Selected Ambient Works have been catalogued on Discogs under the master releases.

The data displayed on this page was gathered at mid April 2020, the collection numbers are likely to have changed a bit since then though I imagine the overall patterns are roughly the same.

Full disclosure: My day job is at Discogs, but this is a personal project done in my own time, created using public apis and open data. To fetch the most collected releases I used the Discogs API and for demographic information on the different bands and artists I used the MusicBrainz API.