What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s 2026 Music Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
Like many dot-com era ideas ushered into use just below the radar in the early 2000s, the Discogs project was poised to solve a niche problem. Floating among the flotsam web forums and message boards were calls for what, in theory, would be an IMDb (Internet Movie Database) for vinyl records—an online place to catalog and organize data for physical albums.
Former Intel programmer, Portland resident, and electronic music enthusiast Kevin Lewandowski was in the thick of those discussions, and in 2000, he began a labor of love to code and log the first couple hundred entries from his own collection into a database of recorded music that now boasts over 136,000 contributors, 19 million releases, and nearly 79 million listings in a robust online archive and marketplace.
Though it began as an electronic music database, it’s now a hub for pretty much every genre of music imaginable, and includes titles ranging from the ultra-rare to the multi-platinum. The doors have blown wide open for Discogs in the ensuing 25 years as everything from a market value pacer, a user-generated wiki of physical music media, and—newly—a hub for purchasing new releases.
Lewandowski moved to Portland after college in New Orleans. An affiliation with club DJs and his love for electronic music set the stage for what Discogs has become. And while Portland as an incubator may not have played a conscious role in his decision to launch the company, Lewandowski cites copious trips to the now-shuttered Ozone Records, which operated at West Burnside and 11th, and other Portland record shops, as a psychic foundation for flipping the switch. The vinyl market in 2000 was essentially in a flatline, with the more mobile compact disc dominating the physical media landscape.
But a vibrant, stubborn community of vinyl collectors was still active online. The fact that buying actual vinyl records was thought of as something only your stoner uncle with a Ford Econoline might be into, ended up being something of a beacon for Lewandowski’s efforts.
“[That vinyl sales weren’t as big] probably allowed me to stay focused,” says Lewandowski. “In my mind, at the time, vinyl was only for DJs. I think it was a smaller world, and probably its own tight community that helped gather a bunch of people with a common interest to start building Discogs, to participate.”
The buzz amongst the community helped build the site during its early years, with user-generated feedback encouraging site improvements and new feature additions. In 2002, two of the site’s most used features—the Wantlist and Collection—were introduced. The broadening Discogs features sowed the seeds for more curious collectors, and with them, calls for a buyers and sellers marketplace. In 2005, the call was answered, and Discogs’ Marketplace was rolled out to fanfare, hatching a revenue stream enabling Discogs to hire its first employee. The company now employs upward of 110 people, about half of whom live in the Portland metro area.
For Lewandowski, the site’s forum and the user engagement therein was critical to the evolution of Discogs into the wide-ranging juggernaut it is today. That users had Lewandowski’s ear, often in real-time, for bug fixes and feature suggestions, helped buy-in and word-of-mouth for collectors of every level.
“We were all talking to each other every day in the forums,” says Lewandowski. “There was a fast feedback cycle, which I think helped out. I really enjoyed being able to do something and get quick feedback. I think it kept [users] interested that things [were able to] change and improve so quickly.”
Craig Moerer owns Records by Mail, a seller of vinyl LPs and 45s since the mid-1970s, with a 8,000-square-foot Portland warehouse housing some 2 million records. Moerer has been a longtime Discogs user, but diversifies his online selling presence with other marketplace entities, like eBay. As a record seller, Moerer is both a critical voice and an advocate for Discogs as a marketplace option. He has no beef with Discogs—he makes that clear—though there are objections in the public sphere he agrees with in terms of what the advent of Discogs has done to the vinyl market at large.
“On one hand, the eBays and the Discogs of the world have harmed our business because they’ve lowered the bar for entry,” explains Moerer. “But on the positive side, it’s injected some dynamism that wouldn’t exist if these platforms weren’t there.”
Bob Ham—owner of Super-Electric Records in Portland—concurs with Moerer’s cited conundrums of buying and selling on Discogs, despite it being his go-to destination for titles that have sat on the shelves of his Eliot neighborhood brick-and-mortar a bit too long.
“There are plenty of people who sell records at places like vintage malls or Facebook Marketplace or at estate sales that will use Discogs as their benchmark for how to price a record,” says Ham. “But on Discogs, the price only goes to the highest number that someone has paid for a particular copy of a record. And they will use that instead of actually considering things like the condition of the vinyl, condition of the sleeve, etc.”
So digging for rare deals has essentially become impossible. For his part in the marketplace debate, Lewandowski agrees.
“We decided to publish our historical sales prices, so you can see when it was sold, in what condition, and for how much,” he says. “I think that made the market more transparent, but by doing that, those rare deals are gone. I can understand people having that frustration, but I think if Discogs didn’t do it, somebody else would. And this type of thing has happened to all kinds of other markets, all the collectible markets.”
Cataloging, too, can occasionally be a clunky endeavor. When uploading media information beyond the basic data identifying the record label, release year, or even the pressing plant where the record was actually forged, things can and do get granular. Attempting to decipher the etchings on a matrix runout of a vinyl album (located on the blank area in the middle of the record, sometimes called “deadwax”), and laboring over the minutiae of special LP versions and colored vinyl is intimidating.
In short, it’s a whole lot of information to get nice and specific about, and a casual collector’s hill to die on when faced with the prospect of beginning their own Discogs cataloging.
“There’s definitely a sense that it’s an exclusive club,” admits Lewandowski. “I personally do think it’s difficult to use. A lot of it was designed by a programmer, me. I wasn’t always thinking about the ease of use. But today, I’m thinking about that.”
Boasting 81 percent growth in contributors since the great vinyl resuscitation of 2020, and with 4 million active users in the past year adding 2.2 million items to their Discogs collections every week, the site, despite the above grumbles, is thriving. And just like in the early days, the company is listening to user feedback and improving the experience of Discogs.
In the short-term, there’s Discogs’ new release sister site, newreleases.discogs.com, which in its infancy is already a destination for buying brand new sealed records through Discogs. Longterm, the vision from the head honcho is steadfast.
“It’s all about making Discogs easier to use and simplifying things while still being able to research deeply,” says Lewandowski. “Our mission is to build the complete record collecting journey. I think people’s record collections are part of their identity, whether you’re just starting with your first record or you’ve been collecting for years. Everyone is on some type of journey with that, to learn about music, to create something that resembles their personality, and what they identify with.”