Discogs, short for discographies, is a website and database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the domain name discogs.com, are owned by Zink Media, Inc., and are located in Portland, Oregon, USA. Discogs is one of the largest online databases of electronic music releases and of releases on vinyl media. It contains more than 2.5 million artists and 3.5 million releases.

The discogs.com domain name was registered in August 2000, and Discogs itself was launched in November 2000 by programmer, DJ, and music fan Kevin Lewandowski originally as a database of electronic music.

He was inspired by the success of community-built sites such as Slashdot, eBay, and Open Directory Project, and decided to use this model for a music discography database.

The site's original goal was to build the most comprehensive database of electronic music, organized around the artists, labels, and releases available in that genre. In 2003 the Discogs system was completely rewritten,[2] and in January 2004 it began to support other genres, starting with hip hop. Since then, it has expanded to include rock and jazz in January 2005 and funk/soul, Latin, and reggae in October of the same year. In January 2006 blues and non-music (e.g. comedy records, field recordings, interviews) were added. Classical music started being supported in June 2007, and in October 2007 the "final genres were turned on" - now adding support for the Stage & Screen, Brass & Military, Children's, and Folk, World, & Country music genres and indeed allowing capture of virtually every single kind of audio recording that has ever been released.

On 30 June 2004, Discogs published its last report, which included information about the number of its contributors. This report claims that Discogs has 15,788 contributors and 260,789 releases. On the Discogs homepage there is information indicating the number of releases, labels, and artists presently in the database. In 2006 the number of releases in the database passed the 500,000 mark. On 25 July 2010 the database contained 2,006,878 releases, 1,603,161 artists and 169,923 labels.

On 20 July 2007 a new system for sellers was introduced on the site called Market Price History. It made information available to users who paid for a subscription —though 60 days information was free— access to the past price items were sold for up to 12 months ago by previous sellers who had sold exactly the same release. At the same time, the US$12 per year charge for advanced subscriptions was abolished, as it was felt that the extra features should be made available to all subscribers now that a better, some may say fairer, revenue stream had been found from sellers and purchasers. However, at the beginning of 2008, the Market Price History was also made free of charge for all users, still giving up to a 12 month view of historical sales data for any release.

In mid-August 2007, Discogs data became publicly accessible via a RESTful, XML-based API and a license that allowed specially attributed use, but did not allow anyone to "alter, transform, or build upon" the data. The license has since been changed to a public domain one. Prior to the advent of this license and API, Discogs data was only accessible via the Discogs web site's HTML interface and was intended to be viewed only using web browsers. The HTML interface remains the only authorized way to modify Discogs data.

On June 7, 2011 version 2 of the API was released.[8] Notable in this release was that a license key was no longer required, the default response was changed from XML to JSON, and the 5000 queries per day limit was removed (although a limit of 2000 image lookups per days was introduced)

On November 1, 2011 a major update to version 2 of the API was released. This new release dropped support for XML, data is always returned in JSON format, however the monthly data dumps of new data are only provided in XML format.