Sunday 28 March 2010

How Discogs changed the face of record buying

Where do you buy your records from? While many vinyl lovers lament the closure of countless record shops due to the rise in internet shopping and a growing digital-only audience, diggers worldwide have had to find new ways to source their fixes of the black crack. Warehouse operations such as Juno and Chemical Records, and popular specialist electronic outlets like Phonica, Boomkat, Hardwax, Rubadub and Piccadilly may be the main ports of call for listeners only interested in brand new records, but if you talk to people who are interested in disco, boogie, '80s and '90s house, UK garage, jungle and other genres of yesteryear, it's likely at least some of their collection has been procured via a website which holds no stock at all: Discogs.
Discogs has become an online phenomenon within the music world, providing a detailed and searchable catalogue of nearly two million releases that currently attracts four million unique visitors, who managed to rack up a staggering 100 million page views between them during January of this year. Portland-based programmer Kevin Lewandowski is the brains behind the operation. He got his first electronic music kicks via some DJ friends at university before going on to buy his own turntables after his graduation. Originally, Lewandowski had planned for Discogs to be a comprehensive database strictly for electronic music, due to the dearth of information on the internet about the subject...
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