About the data

Where it comes from

Many Ethiopian recordings have little or no documentation online, so we started from an existing public catalogue. The October 2026 monthly data dump from Discogs, which Discogs publishes under the CC0 public-domain dedication, was filtered for Ethiopia-related records and cleaned before import. Thank you to the many Discogs contributors who built that catalogue.

Today 2,239 releases and 4,750 artists in this archive come from that import.

What was imported

Release titles, years, formats, labels and catalogue numbers; tracklists with durations; artists and their credits (writers, producers, musicians, studios); alternate spellings of names, including Ge'ez spellings, and short artist biographies; the release notes written by Discogs contributors; and Discogs' own data-quality rating for each release. Each imported release shows where it came from and links back to its Discogs page.

What was not imported

Cover images, ratings and reviews, marketplace and price data, and genre and style tags. Some releases show a thumbnail from a YouTube video that Discogs links to.

How Ethiopia-related records were chosen

A release was kept when it was pressed in Ethiopia, when its title, artists, label or tracks use Ge'ez script, or when its main artist is shown to be Ethiopian by their own releases, for example by having several releases pressed in Ethiopia. Compilations were kept only when several of their tracks are by such artists. Records that merely mention Ethiopia in passing were left out.

What was cleaned up

• Unrelated artists caught by the filter were removed, together with their releases.
• Duplicate artist pages (aliases, spelling variants, English and Ge'ez spellings of the same name) were merged, and the old spellings were kept as aliases.
• Exact duplicate pressings of the same release were left out; different editions, such as an LP and a CD, were kept.
• Artists and releases that were already in this archive were matched, not copied twice.

A starting point, not the final word

Discogs records are often incomplete or contain mistakes. Imported records are marked “Imported from Discogs” and are left unlocked, so anyone signed in can propose corrections and additions, which moderators then review. Once a record has been checked, moderators may lock it as canonical.

Licence and independence

The imported catalogue data is CC0, like the rest of our catalogue data (see the data licence). This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Discogs.