Over the last 15 years, Discogs has developed the near-definitive database for vinyl fanatics, cataloging over 6 million records from nearly 4 million artists. Now the company is working on another laborious project: creating the largest global record store database in the world, called VinylHub.
“Discogs’ mission is to catalog every piece of music in the world, and now they are extending that to record shops,” said the company in its press release.
Initially launched a year ago, VinylHub’s user-generated database isn’t just aimed at cataloging every record shop, but also every record fair, and pop-up shop across the globe. Currently, 4,700 record shops are cataloged, including stores across North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Australia, and Africa.
For each store in the already-extensive record store database, VinylHub offers a description, address, business hours, links to websites, and even information like whether there’s an ATM available. (Similar to other user-generated databases like Wikipedia, it’s best to double-check the information before venturing out to a store.)
Vinylhub’s sister company Discogs is already one of the best avenues online for vinyl collection. The Discog database offers information and a physical music marketplace for 6.3 million recordings. Further, 2.5 million records have been sold on the site this year alone, according to Billboard. Notably, Discogs doesn’t sell records itself: it just offers a platform for record collectors to put up their collections and sellers to purchase them.
The site plans to launch its first official mobile app in the first quarter of 2016, which will offer users the ability to search the database for information and pricing on records and catalogue their collections. It’s unclear if VinylHub will be a part of Discogs’ mobile app but it would certainly be a nice feature.
Nearly 3 million users bought or sold a record through Discogs in 2014. Now, with VinylHub, those users and other record collectors will have a pretty comprehensive database on where to buy records from brick-and-mortar stores too — no matter where they are in the world.
