Inventory & catalogue
Where the catalogue data in your shop comes from
4 min
Every record in your shop is described by data drawn from public sources. This guide explains where the catalogue comes from, how the same principle applies to pricing, what you may do with the data, and what happens when a record is unknown to every source.
Three layers: the catalogue describes, the copy counts, the channels show
The Hub keeps three things apart. The catalogue describes what a release is: artist, title, year, format, barcode, tracklist. The copy is your physical record: its condition, its price, its place in the shop and a quantity of one. The channels show that copy: your webshop, Discogs, Bol.com, eBay and the till. Only the copy has a quantity, and only the copy is yours in the administrative sense. The catalogue is shared by every shop on the Hub, so one correct description of a title serves all of them.
Where the catalogue comes from
The catalogue is assembled from public, openly licensed data: music databases in the public domain that cover the long tail of releases from the past seventy years, together with a public cover-image collection for the sleeves. For new releases, a label or distributor feed your shop connects adds the data the label maintains, licensed for the connected shops. Anything a source does not know, you add yourself through Scan and Go or by hand. We keep the specific sources under review and add to them over time; what does not change is that the catalogue rests on data that is public and free to use, not on a marketplace's content.
Why a cover is sometimes missing
Because covers come from public sources, a release that no public source holds a cover for has none yet, so its page shows a placeholder until someone adds a photo. That is the trade-off for a catalogue you are free to use: broad coverage, with gaps you can fill yourself. The guide on images explains how.
How pricing is handled
The same principle applies to prices. Where the Hub offers a price reference, it draws on a public source, and you always set the final price. Your price stays your decision; the Hub only points you at public comparisons.
A connected sales channel carries only your own listings and the orders that come back, not catalogue data, images or prices; the description a buyer reads always comes from the public sources above.
Good to know
When we say the catalogue is free to use, we mean the catalogue data: what a release is. It does not cover the data a label sends through its feed or the photos shops upload themselves. Each of those has its own terms, covered in the guide on images.
What you may do with the data
You use the catalogue data freely in your own webshop, on your labels, in your till and on the channels you publish to through the Hub. That is what it is for. What you do not do is export it in bulk and reuse it elsewhere, for instance to build a second website or hand a dataset to a third party. The data is neither RecordFlower's nor yours; the licence of the source applies, and for a licensed source such as a label feed, the label's own conditions decide. Article 12.5 of the platform terms sets this out in full.
When a release is unknown
Not every record is in a public dataset: a private pressing, a local release, a test pressing, a barcode nobody has registered. You then create the entry yourself, in Scan and Go or on the laptop, with the artist, title and details you read from the sleeve. The Hub gives the copy its own number, the label printer puts it on the sleeve, and from that moment the copy is scannable on the floor, at the fair and at the till. Whether such entries later feed the shared catalogue is something we are still working out; for now your entry is yours and shows in your shop.
Corrections
A catalogue built from public data is not flawless: a typo in a title, a wrong year, a missing format. Correct what you see on your own copy; that correction is yours and shows in your shop straight away. The public data is refreshed periodically, so a correction made at the source reaches every shop on the Hub without anyone retyping it.
Where this stands
The public datasets and cover images are the sources the catalogue is built from today. Connected label feeds and the photo route of Scan and Go are being built and are not yet available to every shop; the guides on labels and distributors and on Scan and Go describe what they will do.