What is this?

Every record is connected to another. A producer, a mixing engineer who turns up on four other records you already enjoy. An iconic, minor label you discover by picking up an obscure release gives you access to a goldmine of bangers. That network of information is how crate diggers actually find music, and it all sits in Discogs. It just isn't optimised for digging this way.

Dub Digger reshapes it. It is a database centred on a core of dub techno, deep, ambient and experimental labels and artists. Type a name, see who they worked with and what labels they released on. Type a label, see the roster and what came out on it. Then click any artist or label and keep going. A map of the extended scene, drawn from credits. No unwanted noise.

As a dub techno enthusiast and record collector, I built the tool I always wanted: one that finds new acts starting from a curated core set of artists and labels.

So the intended audience is people who are already into the sounds this database is about and likely read Discogs pages, whether for fun or for work. There are no recommendations here, no playlists, nothing trying to guess your taste apart from the fact that you love dubby, minimal, deep techno and ambient sounds. The site assumes you either know what you are looking for, or you will know it when you see it.

That is why the pages are dense, and why almost everything on them is a link. Digging is a series of small jumps: artist, label, another artist, a quick listen to a preview. One click each time, no query to write, just serendipitous discovery.

Not all of Discogs, of course. I created a slice centred on the sounds I am interested in, plus one step out. Right now that is 1,050,040 releases, 305,452 artists and 109,053 labels.

The slice starts with records tagged dub techno, deep techno, dub, ambient or minimal. Everyone credited on those records becomes the core. Then the tool takes one step out, in two directions: people who worked with someone in the core, and people who released on the same labels without ever meeting them.

It stops there. More steps out and you end up with most of techno, which would be a copy of Discogs with no curatorial value. So an artist you expected to find may simply be outside the boundary. That is how it is supposed to work.

Discogs publishes its whole catalogue every month as XML files, free to use. The releases file is over 100 GB once unpacked, and it is where all the information I needed lives.

All the heavy lifting happens once on my own machine. A script reads the dump piece by piece, keeps only the few fields the tool needs, picks the slice described above, and counts everything in advance. Two passes over 19 million releases.

The result is one lightweight database file. The website only reads it. No live API, no database server. The only things that come from outside are the covers and the previews, straight from Apple: the covers load when you open a release, an artist or a label, the previews when you press play.

Everything up to here is rules. I defined the logic, the script applied it, and nothing was really decided by hand. Every artist carries a relevance grade, measured from how much of their work sits in the initial core I identified. That measure works well, until it does not.

Quick example: King Tubby invented dub, and the tool graded him the same as the Spice Girls. His records are tagged as reggae, and the core rule only counts "dub" when it's paired with "electronic". I looked for a better way to fix this but I couldn't find anything. As you may imagine, I wasn't happy to see that.

Inspirations and cultural factors are a matter of history, and genre tags cannot express them. So I added a manual curation layer instead. As a starting point I defined nine "traditions/influences" in the config, among them roots dub, reggae, Detroit techno, afrobeat, dubstep and UK garage.

Belonging to one of them raises an artist to a fixed grade and no higher, and the page always says the grade was raised and which "tradition/influence" did it.

I am also constantly adding manual overrides, to promote or demote specific artists I think should sit at a different level of relevance from where the raw Discogs data places them.

This curation is my own editorial choice and it is the fluid, human aspect of the tool, making this database both a data-driven and a manually curated artefact.

I applied Gall's Law as the founding principle of this project.

Gall's Law is a rule of thumb stating that all working complex systems evolve from simple systems that worked, while complex systems designed from scratch inevitably fail.

That's why I decided to start with the bare minimum of features so that the system can scale up easily. So if you expect a feature and it's not there, this may be the reason. You can have a look at the changelog if you're curious.

Discogs calls everyone credited on a record an artist, so engineers, designers and photographers have pages here too.

Credits on Discogs are entered by volunteers, so they may be uneven and patchy.

This is a beta, and includes several experimental features. If a page looks wrong, it is either the data or one of my editorial calls. Both can be argued with, of course. Feel free to get in touch to discuss it.