How can I set the date tag to reflect the release year and not album/compilation release year?

[hiccup]

Reading this reply in another related thread, it indeed seems that MusicBrainz only uses it as a distinction to supply either YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD.

Picard not writing TDOR for original year

Picard provides two tags: originaldate and originalyear. originalyear is just the year part of originaldate. It depends on that tagging format what gets written where. For ID3 it stores originaldate to TDOR (since this supports YYYY-MM) format. Actually IMHO it should not store originalyear to ID3 at all. Originally Picard didn’t do this, but at some point the default behavior changed to write all otherwise unknown tags to TXXX: frames. This is a side effect of this. If it bothers you under t…

Still strange that the explanation on the MusicBrainz website (link in my previous post) implies some other differences.

I was guessing that it might be intended to differentiate in cases where you would e.g. have a 2015 Japanese SACD re-release from a 2010 USA CD remaster from an original 1960 jazz record, containing recording sessions from 1959 and 1960.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case then.