The Riffology Vault

The Vault is the record collection behind Riffology, the podcast and site that tells the stories behind great rock and metal albums. It holds 998 albums by 40 artists, from 1967 to today, and it grows every month.

Release dates are surprisingly hard to get right. Reissues, promo copies and regional releases all muddy the water, so every date in the Vault is checked across several sources: the album's own Wikipedia article, Wikidata, and the full release history on MusicBrainz, with Apple Music and Deezer as further evidence. Where the sources agree on a day, you get the day. Where they only agree on a month or a year, that's all we show. When the US and UK dates differ, both are listed.

Every cover is the best available copy from the Cover Art Archive, Apple Music, fanart.tv or Deezer, squared up and sized at 1500 pixels or more, ready for print or a podcast feed.

Popularity is a score from 0 to 100 comparing each album and artist with everything else in the Vault. It blends how many people listen today on ListenBrainz, how many read about them on Wikipedia over the last year, and their Deezer fans. It's a measure of who's still listening, not of chart history or sales.

Album pages list pressings from Discogs, read live: release dates, countries, formats, labels, catalogue numbers, barcodes and matrix numbers for the key pressings.

The Vault draws on MusicBrainz, Wikidata, Wikipedia, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, fanart.tv, Discogs, Apple Music and Deezer, and links every album and artist back to them. Everything is refreshed monthly, so new releases and corrections find their way in.

Spotted something wrong? Tell us at riffology.co.