Overview
Discogs is the world's largest music database and marketplace API, covering vinyl records, CDs, and tapes with detailed release data, artist biographies, and pricing. You can search the catalog and read artist or release data without authentication; user collection management and marketplace actions require OAuth. It is ideal for building record collection apps, price guides, or music history tools.
Beginner Tip
Anonymous requests are rate-limited to 25 per minute, but authenticating with a personal access token (from your Discogs Settings > Developers page) raises the limit to 60 per minute — always use a token even for read-only use. Include a descriptive User-Agent header (e.g., MyApp/1.0) to avoid 403 errors from their bot filter.
Measurement Record
What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.
- Request
- GET https://api.discogs.com/releases/1
- Result
- HTTP 200 · application/json · 12,488 bytes · compressed
- Response time
- 771 ms (median of 3) · fastest 192 ms
- Transport
- TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 · certificate issued by Google Trust Services
- Browser CORS
- Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
- Served by
- cloudflare
- Recorded
- 2026-08-10
Available Data
The kind of data this API exposes, based on its documentation. We could not call the endpoint to confirm the exact field names.
Captured Response
Captured from a real request to https://api.discogs.com/releases/1 on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.
{
"id": 1,
"status": "Accepted",
"year": 1999,
"resource_url": "https://api.discogs.com/releases/1",
"uri": "https://www.discogs.com/release/1-The-Persuader-Stockholm",
"artists": [
{
"name": "The Persuader",
"anv": "",
"join": "",
"role": "",
"tracks": "",
"id": 1,
"resource_url": "https://api.discogs.com/artists/1",
"thumbnail_url": "https://i.discogs.com/0J9_1DFJtRnLxb1DnY0NYlnlDCBo1QmAka3s6eAcyJw/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:466/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9BLTEtMTU0/MzY1OTcyMS0…"
}
],
"artists_sort": "Persuader, The",
"labels": [
{
"name": "Svek",
"catno": "SK032",
"entity_type": "1",
"entity_type_name": "Label",
"id": 5,
"resource_url": "https://api.discogs.com/labels/5",
"thumbnail_url": "https://i.discogs.com/XIJdm6dtIU2Z2eX6GP5COk7UrHgh3n17F4ItrLq7pw8/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:337/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9MLTUtMTEz/NjY2MjUxNy5…"
}
],
"series": [],
"companies": [
{
"name": "The Globe Studios",
"catno": "",
"entity_type": "23",
"entity_type_name": "Recorded At",
"id": 271046,
"resource_url": "https://api.discogs.com/labels/271046"
}
],
"formats": [
{
"name": "Vinyl",
"qty": "2",
"descriptions": [
"12\""
]
}
],
"data_quality": "Cor
… Field Reference
id Unique Discogs release ID. artists List of artists credited on this release. year Original release year of the record. Implementation Example
Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.
const url = "https://api.discogs.com/releases/1";
// Replace headers or query params with the values required by this API.
const response = await fetch(url, {
headers: {
"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
}
});
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data); What Can You Build?
Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.
How This API Fails
We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.
{
"message": "The requested resource was not found."
} Common Errors & Troubleshooting
Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.
Measured Score Breakdown
Live HTTP request to the API endpoint
Fully tested on Aug 10, 2026
Technical Specifications
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