Moving to Discogs for Enhanced Accuracy

Big Changes at Bopster: Moving to Discogs for Enhanced Accuracy

Since the summer of 2025, Bopster and Yearify have relied on MusicBrainz to power the metadata that tells you who you’re listening to and when their hits were released. It’s served us well, but as we’ve grown, we’ve realized it’s time for an upgrade.

Today, we are excited to announce a significant shift in our infrastructure: Bopster is moving from MusicBrainz to a dedicated Discogs PostgreSQL database.

Why the Change?

December 2025 was a record-breaking month for us. We saw our visitor numbers skyrocket from thousands to tens of thousands. While this growth is incredible, it put immense strain on our MusicBrainz search integration and required a massive increase in server capacity.

Thanks to your generous donations, we were able to invest in a more robust solution that handles this load while fixing some persistent data issues.

While MusicBrainz offered solid data, our research showed that it provided the correct release year about 80% of the time. The way the database was structured often led our scripts to either surface "surface-level" data that lacked detail or "dive too deep"—returning demos and unreleased tracks instead of the original hits.

The Discogs Advantage

By switching to a local Discogs dump, we’ve seen immediate, tangible improvements:

• Increased Accuracy: We’ve seen a 10-15% boost in finding the correct release year.

• Better Context: Improved matching for albums and genres.

• Superior Speed: Even though the database is larger, the structure allows our scripts to find the right info faster without "over-searching."

Implementation Timeline

We are rolling this change out in phases across our ecosystem. Please take note of the upcoming deprecation dates for older MusicBrainz-powered tools.

Note: "Song Year Look Up" functionality has already been integrated into Yearify 2.0 using the new Discogs backend.

We Value Your Feedback

Our goal is to provide the most accurate music data possible. If you have questions about this transition, or if you feel that MusicBrainz provided better results for specific artists or eras, we want to hear from you.

Please reach out to us at support@bopster.app with your thoughts or bug reports.

Thank you for being part of the Bopster community and helping us build a better way to explore music!