State of the Crate · mid-2026

The shape of music, told by the people who actually listen.

A mid-year snapshot of every master record in the catalogue — 2,541,389 of them — sorted not by chart position but by who owns them and who plays them. Numbers from 2026-05-25. Hand-cut, opinionated, honest about gaps.

The shape of the catalogue

2,541,389

master records, sourced from the Discogs CC0 catalogue and cross-referenced with our DJ-set ingestion and collector signal graph.

The cube, today

Out of 2,541,389 records, only 233 are both owned and played.

Every record in crate gets a 3-axis verdict: critic / collector / DJ. The critic axis is still hydrating (more on that below), so today the cube is effectively 2D. Here's what the data shows for the two axes we can read.

cube_quadrant 00095.7% of catalogue

2,431,682

No signal

Records nobody is collecting, no DJ is playing, no critic has touched. The long dark tail.

cube_quadrant 1004.29% of catalogue

109,019

Collector only

Owned by someone, somewhere — but absent from DJ sets and critic discourse.

cube_quadrant 0100.018% of catalogue

455

DJ only

Records that work on the dance floor but the collector economy has not noticed yet. Working tools of the trade.

cube_quadrant 1100.009% of catalogue

233

Collector + DJ

The hand-cut intersection. Records that are owned AND played. Pre-critic. Dub-plate territory.

Read this carefully: 0.009% of the catalogue is owned AND played. That's 233 records out of two and a half million. The DJ-only quadrant (455 records) is dub-plate territory — records that work on dance floors but the collector economy hasn't picked up yet. If you sync-supervise, those are your unfound discoveries.

What the catalogue is, by genre

Rock is biggest. Electronic is closing fast.

Rock's lead is roughly 12% over Electronic. Jazz is much smaller than the cultural conversation suggests — only 8% the size of Rock, and a quarter the size of Electronic. The "long tail" in genre terms isn't niche genres, it's the -637,064 records that don't fit cleanly in any of these buckets.

  • 01Rock779,934
  • 02Electronic697,415
  • 03Pop525,217
  • 04Folk, World, & Country333,938
  • 05Jazz201,040
  • 06Funk / Soul176,530
  • 07Classical156,371
  • 08Hip Hop122,869
  • 09Latin110,532
  • 10Stage & Screen74,607

The style chart, top 12

House is the #2 style on Earth.

By count of master records tagged with each style, House (101,673) sits right behind Pop Rock (102,569) and ahead of Indie Rock, Synth-pop, and Alternative Rock combined. The global catalogue tells you what culture actually committed to vinyl and shellac, and the answer surprises every collector we've shown it to: Ambient (68,941) is bigger than Indie Rock (65,895). Hardcore (69,283) is bigger than Alternative Rock (66,182).

  • 01Pop Rock102,569
  • 02House101,673
  • 03Vocal95,011
  • 04Punk90,309
  • 05Experimental87,145
  • 06Techno78,460
  • 07Hardcore69,283
  • 08Ambient68,941
  • 09Alternative Rock66,182
  • 10Indie Rock65,895
  • 11Synth-pop64,395
  • 12Folk63,682

What this snapshot doesn't show

The critic axis is still hydrating.

Crate's cube uses three axes: critic, collector, DJ. The collector and DJ axes are live. The critic axis — built from archived reviews, blog posts, and press mentions — is still being ingested. Until it's populated, the cube is effectively two-dimensional.

When the critic axis lands (tracked at ridden#350), four more quadrants come online: critics-only, critics + collectors, critics + DJs, and the full (1,1,1) intersection. The last one — records that all three communities have validated — is probably under 50 records. That's what makes the cube interesting.

We're also not showing: pressing-level rarity (insert, in progress), audio features like BPM and key (acousticbrainz hydration pending), and the long tail of secondary sources — fan blogs, mix-set tracklists, podcast mentions, YouTube archaeology — that the 2,541,389 number doesn't capture. Those land via insert and wayfind in the coming cycles.

For now: two axes, one snapshot, 233 records in the gold-cut intersection. Worth knowing where they are.

How to use this

Three things you can do, today.

  • Search the catalogue yourself.

    Free, no signup, no algorithm. crate.hosaka.fm/crate. Click a result row to see the record's cube position on cube.

  • Find the 455 records that DJs play but collectors haven't picked up.

    Currently visible through the cube chip on each result row. A direct query surface is coming next cycle.

  • Use the data in your own work.

    If you supervise music for film, TV, advertising, or trailers — or you run a reissue label, or build DJ tools — the cube quadrant + long-tail DJ-play data is queryable. Get in touch at hello@hosaka.fm.