• Registered: 2012-08-28

Topic: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

I'm not too familiar with how MusicBrainz works. Say I wanted to find out how many songs were released in the UK in 1990 -- is there a search query that I can run on the web interface to do that? Or will a query like that give me all the information on all those songs (without tallying them up)? I'd like to do a bunch of queries like this to see how diverse the MusicBrainz database is... so what fraction of MusicBrainz database is German songs, British songs, Japanese songs, French songs, Italian songs, etc...? (I guess I also want to know how large the entire database is... 1 million songs or 100 million songs?)

Is this possible?  Thanks in advance for any help!

  • Registered: 2012-08-28

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

Hmm. I guess I figured it out:

http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=dat … d=advanced

So there's only 1,657 songs from the UK... I haven't figured out how to tell how many songs are in the entire database, but that number makes me think it's closer to 1 million rather than 100 million....

  • Registered: 2010-09-09

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

We have some statistics pages at http://musicbrainz.org/statistics. http://musicbrainz.org/statistics/countries in particular should be of interest.

By the way, the query you linked only finds things where the month and day are unknown. http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=dat … d=advanced finds 2,312.

  • From: Singapore
  • Registered: 2007-02-13

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

nikki wrote:

By the way, the query you linked only finds things where the month and day are unknown. http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=dat … d=advanced finds 2,312.

That's a release search, not a song/recording search (original query by user was wrong).

http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=dat … d=advanced shows 28,423 recordings known to have been released in the UK in 1990.

voiceinsideyou's Website

5 Reply by ym

  • ym
  • Member
  • Offline
  • From: Istanbul, Turkey
  • Registered: 2008-10-08

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

voiceinsideyou wrote:
nikki wrote:

By the way, the query you linked only finds things where the month and day are unknown. http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=dat … d=advanced finds 2,312.

That's a release search, not a song/recording search (original query by user was wrong).

http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=dat … d=advanced shows 28,423 recordings known to have been released in the UK in 1990.

16,182 if you exclude Compilations: http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=dat … d=advanced

  • From: Singapore
  • Registered: 2007-02-13

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

If you want to exclude compilations you also need to exclude album re-releases as well, or it's not consistent. But that's not really possible to do via search.

It depends what the question is; if the question is really "how many new recordings were released in 1990 in UK?" then you'd probably be best to approximate via a recording date rather than release dates - but we don't have that :)

voiceinsideyou's Website

  • Registered: 2012-06-23

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

mhhfive wrote:

I haven't figured out how to tell how many songs are in the entire database, but that number makes me think it's closer to 1 million rather than 100 million....

http://musicbrainz.org/statistics

  • Registered: 2012-08-28

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

Wow. Thanks, everyone for the pointers. I was apparently confused about what a "release" was. 

From the statistics page, it looks like "unknown country" has the largest number of "releases" -- any tips on how to turn that into number of recordings (including re-releases&compilations is fine)?

And it's interesting that Musicbrainz "only" has about 11M songs in it... that's about the same size as CDDB was about 10 years ago, I think.

  • Registered: 2008-04-25

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

That may depend on how CDDB counts songs. I don't know how they do that but on MusicBrainz a recording can be shared by many tracks so the two might not be comparable.

mfmeulenbelt's Website

  • Registered: 2012-08-28

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

mfmeulenbelt wrote:

... but on MusicBrainz a recording can be shared by many tracks so the two might not be comparable.

So are you saying that MusicBrainz might have a better way of de-duplicating songs (and the CDDB collection may be inflated b/c they count the same song multiple times)?

  • From: Singapore
  • Registered: 2007-02-13

Re: Is this search possible..? How many songs from the UK?

mhhfive wrote:

So are you saying that MusicBrainz might have a better way of de-duplicating songs (and the CDDB collection may be inflated b/c they count the same song multiple times)?

Possibly. MusicBrainz is a proper relational model with a recording concept; where recordings are shared between multiple releases. I don't believe CDDB has such a concept.

At the end of the day, since CDDB is proprietary there's really no way to tell what methodology is being used to produce #s. Probably the one that leads to a bigger number.

Also, should be careful as to what you mean with your terminology. If a song has multiple versions (maybe one acoustic, one instrumental, one extended version etc) do you want that counted multiple times? Music is complicated. :)

voiceinsideyou's Website