Question about Bandcamp publish dates

MusicBrainz
1

I was doing some searching and wasn’t coming up with any concrete answers, so here’s a question that I have regarding dates on Bandcamp.

Take for instance, this album from musician Steven R. Smith. The release date on the public-facing page is clearly in reference to the album’s original release date. Obviously this would not be an accurate date to use, as Bandcamp was not even around in 2002.

To counter this, sometimes we rely on the datePublished field in the source code, and it is the value that the Bandcamp import script uses, but again in this case it is set to the 31st of May, 2002. Why Bandcamp allows free entry into the datePublished field is beyond me, but I guess that’s just how it is.

However, with a little bit more digging around in the source code, there also seems to be a value in some sort of Javascript something or another (I’m no web dev), "publish_date":"27 Jan 2012 21:05:51 GMT". This seems to be fairly consistent with what an actual publish date would be for the album: others of a similar nature have close values, and using the fairly sparse information given by the Wayback Machine it does appear to be an accurate idea of when it was added. This album for example, is not on the snap taken in September of 2011 but is on the snap taken in February of 2012, making a 2012/01/27 release date fully reasonable to assume.

Is this a good value to use? It appears to match the datePublished value in most cases, where said value is not obviously faked, so it looks like a reliable method to me. What are your thoughts?

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2

There is a userscript that will display the actual publication date for Bandcamp releases.

4

Yeah, that is the userscript that I am using, and it’s the value that the Bandcamp import script uses, but they are clearly wrong in this case. This is why I’m asking if the other value, publish_date, is acceptable to use in this scenario or in other similar circumstances.

1 Like
5

https://github.com/murdos/musicbrainz-userscripts/blob/master/bandcamp_importer.user.js actually looks at both values:

       // Grab release event information
        let date = this.convdate(bandcampAlbumData.current.release_date);
        if (date) {
            if (!(date.year > 2008 || (date.year == 2008 && date.month >= 9))) {
                // use publish date if release date is before Bandcamp launch (2008-09)
                let pdate = this.convdate(bandcampAlbumData.current.publish_date);
                if (pdate) {
                    date = pdate;
                }
            }
            release.year = date.year;
            release.month = date.month;
            release.day = date.day;
        }

I suspect that this still isn’t foolproof: what if the artist entered a release date of 2010 but only published the album on Bandcamp in 2020? I don’t know of any better approach, though.

6

Yes, Bandcamp release dates aren’t totally reliable, it all depends on how things were entered by label and/or artist.

For most recent digital only versions dates extracted by the script work well.
But sometimes original release date is set for newly available digital releases.

Script is only an helper.

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7

So what would you suggest for this case or those similar? I would say that using judgment and the cross-reference of the Wayback Machine it’s fair to assume that the 2012/01/27 date pulled from the source is accurate. Just add it as such? It’s better than being blatantly incorrect. I guess it’s an inherent problem with digital rereleases; it’s basically impossible to accurately pinpoint when they were made available, but it certainly deserves to be in the database.

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