TL;DR: Collector nerd wants to create a higher quality Discogs dedicated to Green Day.
The renewed Green Day FM / Rejects Club / Green Day Live gave me an idea and I’m curious if others are interested in such a project as well.
I’ve been enjoying Green Day for nearly 20 years now and one of my big hobbies is collecting their music. It started out with collecting CD Albums, then Single CD’s, Vinyl, Cassettes, different countries pressings, different pressing all together and now basically anything that seems to be a little different from anything I already have.
I’ve been keeping it all neatly in my Excel sheet, now ranging over 400 different media items related to Green Day. Containing details like catalogue numbers, barcodes, matrix runouts and details on contents + room for extra comments on variations.
Next to that I’m also in the (not always so dedicated) process of digitalizing everything I have. I’m also planning on adding pictures/scans of the contents etc. etc. basically trying to create a digital catalogue of my collection.
This brought me to the idea of compiling a sort of Discogs like catalogue of Green Day media. Aiming to raise the quality of te catalogue like the GDFM team is doing with the Green Day Live project (over Setlist.fm).
I’m curious to see if people are interesting, what kind of quality standard we want to set and to what extend GDFM is able/willing to provide such a catalogue (both in the IT technical aspect as well as copyrights).
My ultimate goal would be to have a full catalogue of every bit of released Green Day media, incl. release details, pictures etc for reference to archive what has been released in all it’s different appearances and easily check different releases for collecting purposes.
That would be really cool u should do it! There was another site i think greendaydiscography.com or something? Maybe you could get in touch with them about restarting and updating that?
Sounds like a great idea, Jim! As much as I’d like to help you out by building something for you here, I simply don’t have the time or the server resources for another project of this scale. I’ve been working on adding features for the past 7 months now at the expense of the actual content on the site (like finishing up the rebuild of the discography section, song pages for side project bands, finishing the new session guides, etc.). At this point, I’d really like to get back to that rather than starting another huge project.
I think this would be great as a standalone site though. There’s enough content for you to make the catalogue the sole focus of a website, and there’s a lot you could do to make it fun for collectors, like having a more advanced version of what I built in the Reject Club collectors corner section.
One thing I’d note, though, is there’s not a ton of people who collect at that level. It will be appreciated by all, but actually used regularly by a much smaller group of hardcore collectors. That group of people is likely going to continue using Discogs simply due to the buy/sell functions available there and the larger community. I don’t mean for that to discourage you, it’s just that while their content quality for releases could be much improved, you can’t compete with their reach, which includes people and record stores around the world buying and selling the items your target audience is looking for.
Thanks for you elaborate reply! I get what you’re saying and I’m just really glad you guys have been able to make GreenDay.fm even better than it was, so please keep your focus there!
My aim is mainly to build an archive, inspired by the way you are doing it here on this site. So even in people just visit every now and then and maybe check in the catalogue if their CD’s, Vinyl is in there, it could help the catalogue grow in that way.
Anyhow, since my knowledge on website building is very limited and my time as a young father is sparse, it may take some time to get such a project online. But at least I’m glad to see the positive reactions to my idea!