Discogs: Ever thought of buying it?

Hi. Although this is my 1st post in these forums, I thought I'd broach the subject. Have the management ever thought of using some of the CBS loot to buy Discogs & use it as a subsidiary site? To me, the benefits are two, maybe threefold.

1: Data

There is a hell of a lot of information on Discogs that could be used to improve the service here on Last.fm. Most artist profiles here don't show much about what the artists have released, just mostly about the artists themselves. Discogs could provide that information, maybe via a "Learn More" type direct link. Also there is a framework in place on Discogs to distinguish between different artists or groups with the same name.

For example, I listen to a lot of As One. As of now, if someone here looks at that, they see there are 2 different groups/artists using that name, but the scrobbler can't distinguish between the two. Even look at the comments on the As One page; users are looking for ways to distinguish between the two. Discogs does this already, and has done for years. There is no error, no way of mistaking the two. Discogs also has another As One, which isn't mentioned here. This, in my eyes, would add a lot of value to the information provided by Last.fm, as I'd wager that a lot of users might/would find this information useful. Hell, quite a few of my favourite artists have profiles and images on here that have already been cut'n'pasted direct from Discogs. Lookee here Alex Under & Alex Under.

2: Marketplace

Discogs has a selling function available to all users that rivals, if not betters, Ebay for music sales worldwide in my opinion. In the Discogs Marketplace, there are at the moment 1,944,007 items for sale worldwide. Ebay.co.uk has 546,523 in the music category, and this includes memorabilia, storage items & cases/sleeves. Ebay.com has 501,868 items, Ebay.de has 890617 CD & Vinyl listed. This could help line the coffers of Last.fm somewhat, as discogs takes 5% of all sales made, no matter what value & collected every month. Currently the number of sales on Discogs doesn't fluctuate from that figure by maybe 3% either way. Think of that over years. That's a lot of wonga by anyone's books.

3) Moderators

Given the size of Discogs and the data it holds, to ensure its correctness & integrity, there are hundreds of moderators that help, or helped (more of that in a bit) that give up their free time & effort to ensure that the data contained remains as accurate & as correct as possible. This is because most of them are committed musics collectors. They have a passion for correctness, being record collectors (And how many here don't have their CDs or records cataloged to a system only they can follow? ;)) naturally. This is a resource that can't be overlooked really. Many workers working for free. That is a good thing, and less cost overall.

Finally, the owner & the imaginatively titled "Community Manager" of Discogs at the moment seem to be on a 2 man mission to destroy the hard work of all the submitters over the years by making all the data less viable & more prone to error by making all edits to releases, artists & labels "Live" as soon as it has been entered, whereas before the moderators "worked" the queue of submissions & voted in what was correct, in the newest version of Discogs.

Naturally, this has virtually all the prominent users up in arms at the changes, as they haven't been coded, tested or implemented at all correctly, leaving the site bug-ridden & hard to use. These two "Superusers" have answered little or nothing about the changes & didn't even ask if anyone wanted them. They just went ahead and did it. And did it poorly. If you have a sniff round the help forums there, you'll see the level of dissatisfaction & dissent from the users & moderators at these latest round of changes, and want it changed back to the old version.

In summary, personally I think it would be a huge boon to Last.fm to assume control discogs, but this is obviously your choice, Last.fm management.

I'm going to move this to the Feedback and Ideas forum as it's much more suited to there, this isn't really a 'development' issue at all.

As for the suggestion, I don't think it's really necessary at all. The only real benefit I see from it is the improved data for album/single releases/tracklists, etc., which would be great. BUT this will come as part of the musicbrainz integration when that eventually is implemented fully, albeit from a different source.