My thoughts on all this have progressed and I might describe another approach soon. If I would sit down to create a mock-up today, it would look different.
But one take-away is definitely about this:
These two data bits don’t belong together. The country data is supposed to identify the release of the album, not the “release” of the digital version. The word “release” should not be confused with availability. “United States” in the context of this digital media only means that an editor noticed its availability when looking up this page: My Life (Bonus Track Version) - Album by Mary J. Blige - Apple Music.
The digital album is a derivative of an album that was first released 1994-11-29.
An album that was first released as digital media is an actual release, though.
The release date refers to the release of an album and has nothing to do with the format. When you rip from vinyl, the release date is still the release date of the vinyl.
The digital version is an entity described as “release” here at MB, but it is not actually a release. It will have a different UPC but that is just a detail for tracking sales. It does not make this digital version a new release.
When you obtain the digital album, you would want the metadata from the original release (except for release country), but you would not want to match it against the CD or vinyl release. A solution to this problem is currently brewing in my mind…
It follows that change “1” in the mockup should be corrected, because that is not the “Release date”. It is a “Sales start date”.
Change “1” was a nod to what @HibiscusKazeneko said:
This confused me. I’ll say again: release date should not be confused with sales start date. Labels are correct to give the original release date. When an album becomes available through iTunes, that does not make the offering a different release. Adopting the sales start date as the release date is not a good idea. There is only one case in which this is correct, and that is when the album was first released through this vendor.
I now regard my submission of My Life (Bonus Track Version) as a wrong release entry, because the album was not released as digital media.
When I submit a fingerprint from the iTunes version via Picard, ideally, I could select to match against the original album, but without having to bother to pick a particular country release, because that is not something I can know, unless the album was only ever released in one country.
My thoughts are that a digital media release should only be submitted if the album was first released in digital format. All other cases are just digital derivatives and not “releases” in a strict sense of the word.
When you submit a fingerprint of a file that was already digital, when you obtained it, it might be deemed (based on AcoustID) the same recording as the CD release, with which it would be wrong to match, because you just don’t know how the digital file was created in the fist place. I would want the Media tag to remain “Unknown” or left out.
When all you have about the original album is the release date, the album title, the track list, the cover, and you don’t have the label, the country, the original release media, that is the situation when buying from Apple. A solution, using Picard, might be to match against the whole release group to avoid getting metadata tags “Release Country”, “Media”, “Label”.