What is a good approach for determining the reissue date for when an album was posted on a WEB store? Often they curate discographies under the first publication of an album to make them simple to browse, and it hasn’t occured to them to learn from other databases that carry 2 dates.
Sometimes a date can be extracted from other stores using Harmony or Xythium. But this does not always work when all of them only show the original publication. A likely year can be otained from the ISRC codes, taking the most recent year out of the album. This works with small labels, but large labels tend to backdate all their remasters to the original year. It is also only an approximation. ISRC of 21 could actually be released in 2022 because the album took a while to prepare.
Dolby Atmos is only rarely posted as a separate release on Tidal. It is always folded under the stereo release in Apple Music without any way of obtaining data about it.
When all methods fail, do you leave the date field blank?
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If the release is on TIDAL and has the same barcode, you can also check the “streamstart” date. This is a little tricky, but it’s most of the time the correct date (not always). You can find that by right clicking on a page and selecting “inspect”. After going to the network tab, refresh the page. Click all debugging prompts. Then do a search for “streamstart”. This is the date that a release actually started to stream on TIDAL. However, I have found some wrong dates (original dates), even on this. It’s rare though. You can also check the date they have on mora.jp & 7digital. They are often times the true date as well (but once again, not always). Another source: https://isrcsearch.ifpi.org/, search by barcode and they will give you often times a release date, many times it’s blank though. Dolby Atmos releases on TIDAL always have the streamstart date as described above as a true release date. We have basically ignored the Dolby Atmos on Apple. You can just mention it in the annotation if desired. It really should still be the same release since the barcode doesn’t change. On TIDAL, they get their own barcodes. Other source to mention is search for a release on YouTube Music (use Harmony’s link) by barcode. Then substitute the “music.yahoo” for “www.yahoo” in the URL to bring you to the YouTube video form of the release. Click on a track and look at the “last updated” date. Sometimes these are the true release date. No site is 100% accurate unfortunately, so use your best judgment. And yes, if you can’t be sure, just leave it blank.
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Stream Start Date is good. Is this something that could be added to Harmony?
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