I would like some opinions before editing this digital media release of “Stripped”.
Starting point: cached data from a-tisket and data associated with the UPC via isrcsearch.ifpi.org.
Let’s examine the release date:
2002-10-29 is given on the release page. The editor did not leave a note, only a link to Amazon US page, which has no data for the release date (MP3 and streaming media). The archive.org snapshot that was valid when the editor made the entry states 2002-10-29 as the “Original Release Date”. OK, so that is where he/she got the date from, but it was wrong to use it as the digital release date.
The question is, can we figure out the actual digital release date? I have a feeling that 2002-07-19 is not really the digital release date.
- Looking at the iTunes JSON data, 19 of the 20 songs were originally released 2002-10-28, one was released 2002-09-14. So, it seems impossible that the album should have been released in July, when the songs were released later. These kinds of situations are really annoying!
- Three other releases have the same UPC. I guess the UPC release date always refers to the earliest date (in whatever format that was). When it is reused for later releases in other formats, the release date still is the earliest. Because the digital release does not have its own UPC, we cannot know when it was released.
What should I do? I tend to want to
- add the UPC to the release
- remove the release date and add an annotation instead
- update the release countries (with a-tisket data, I would add a new release and then merge it with the existing release - I don’t know of a faster way to batch-add all of the 204 countries).
