Release dates prior to 2004 (2026 roadmap) - Suggestions

albummaster

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An item on the 2026 roadmap is to allow release dates to be populated on BEA for albums prior to 2004, so this thread is just to discuss how this might be implemented.

As of now, BEA only requires a release date for albums released since 2004. It is now proposed that for albums released between 1960 and 2003, an exact release date should be able to be provided (optionally), but should only be populated where a date can be reliably corroborated (using the same three external sources as for release years to keep things consistent).

The current thinking is to use 1960 as the cut-off as it's basically the start of the 'album era' and gives equal treatment of jazz, classical LPs, non-Anglo catalogues etc (rather than picking mid-60s which could be seen as more contrived towards popular music). For albums prior to 1960, it is proposed that precise release dates will not be required (due to historical release practices and source reliability).

External corroboration provides clarity for resolving disputes and has been a helpful mechanism for populating release years. Where no such external corroboration exists, an album should be explicitly flagged as having no release date (to avoid the same albums being repeatedly re-checked and debated). If external sources only agree on the month and year, the day could be left blank and the album also flagged as having no release date.

There are ~260k albums on BEA; 145k of these were released since 2004; ~114k albums released between 1960 and 2004 (so the metrics quite similar for both sets of albums). There's a small remainder of albums on BEA released prior to 1960.

(A decent reference thread located here from when we began to populate release dates since 2004.)
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Romanelli

Bone Swah

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Location: Broomfield, Colorado

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I am not looking forward to this at all. I believe it will become a flood, and the amount of work will be increased by a lot. We are still 4800 plus albums away from having the Less Than 5 Tracks list done. I work several of these daily, and others work bunches as well...still over 4800 from completion. New releases are being added daily. Mixed Nationality for individual artists and other items that require research are constant sources of additional work. And aside from those who moderate their own site additions (thank you!), data moderation right now for the site is mostly 2 people.

How much of a priority is it really to know that Three Snakes And One Charm by The Black Crowes was released specifically on July 23, 1996? I know some do care...but do that many people really need info about precise release dates from more than 20 years ago?

I believe that if you're going to do this, proposed changes should be submitted in the moderation comments so that they can be researched by moderators. Or dropped into a list like the Less Than 5 tracks albums are. Once changed, the sources for the change, or the reason why no change is being made should be added to the notes.

You're talking about 114k albums that would be affected by this. Maybe it would be more of a manageable thing and less intimidating if you did one year at a time. Start with 2003, and when that list is done, release 2002. I believe it would also be easier to get more people involved with a smaller and less intimidating list.
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albummaster

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Romanelli wrote:

I am not looking forward to this at all. I believe it will become a flood, and the amount of work will be increased by a lot. We are still 4800 plus albums away from having the Less Than 5 Tracks list done. I work several of these daily, and others work bunches as well...still over 4800 from completion. New releases are being added daily. Mixed Nationality for individual artists and other items that require research are constant sources of additional work. And aside from those who moderate their own site additions (thank you!), data moderation right now for the site is mostly 2 people.

How much of a priority is it really to know that Three Snakes And One Charm by The Black Crowes was released specifically on July 23, 1996? I know some do care...but do that many people really need info about precise release dates from more than 20 years ago?

I believe that if you're going to do this, proposed changes should be submitted in the moderation comments so that they can be researched by moderators. Or dropped into a list like the Less Than 5 tracks albums are. Once changed, the sources for the change, or the reason why no change is being made should be added to the notes.

You're talking about 114k albums that would be affected by this. Maybe it would be more of a manageable thing and less intimidating if you did one year at a time. Start with 2003, and when that list is done, release 2002. I believe it would also be easier to get more people involved with a smaller and less intimidating list.

Thanks very much for feedback, expectation is that these albums are updated gradually over time, not urgent (or required) but BEA often misses important/popular album anniversaries (the main purpose of adding).

Not sure approaching this year by year would help BEA capture those more important anniversaries quickly enough, but I do like the idea of 'unlocking' in batches if it makes things look less intimidating. It perhaps could be based on overall rank e.g. top 10,000 first (if done in batches). At the same time, some users may want to update albums by their favorite artists, so restricting updates could actually create extra work. Allowing any qualifying album to be updated at any time might be simpler and more flexible (and there's no real need to track which albums haven't been updated since the data is optional).

For albums older than 2004, the moderation 'status' of an album wouldn't be affected by presence or absence of a release date (as it would be optional), so extra work chasing a queue down is hopefully not going to be a factor (if 'batches' of albums were flagged for updating as per start of previous paragraph this would introduce this problem). Updating the data in response to a correction adds work for moderators in handling the correction and double-checking it, so people who can already update release dates should continue to be allowed to update release dates (imo).
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MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

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I know you guys are probably tired of me chiming in on threads like this... 🧐

Romanelli wrote:

We are still 4800 plus albums away from having the Less Than 5 Tracks list done. I work several of these daily, and others work bunches as well...still over 4800 from completion. New releases are being added daily.

I didn't even know this was such a problem. It looks like the procedure is just to leave a comment for an album that's on the list, I guess with the total time and a link to the evidence? And then someone else comes along and verifies it? OK, I did one just now... it seems like there should be a more efficient way to do this, since only the admins and "Gurus" here can validate these. I'd suggest lowering the "Guru" threshold to 25,000 mod points (plus a request for "early promotion" that you could reject if you're not impressed with the person's attention to detail), but that would all look rather self-serving since I myself am a megalomaniac who is currently approaching 25,000 mod points.

albummaster wrote:

I do like the idea of 'unlocking' in batches if it makes things look less intimidating. It perhaps could be based on overall rank e.g. top 10,000 first (if done in batches). At the same time, some users may want to update albums by their favorite artists, so restricting updates could actually create extra work. Allowing any qualifying album to be updated at any time might be simpler and more flexible (and there's no real need to track which albums haven't been updated since the data is optional).

If you're mainly concerned about anniversaries, then it should definitely be done in batches, highest-ranked first, maybe 1,000 at a time. Then let the Level 6 and higher people add dates for everything else?

albummaster

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MadhattanJack wrote:

I know you guys are probably tired of me chiming in on threads like this... 🧐

I didn't even know this was such a problem. It looks like the procedure is just to leave a comment for an album that's on the list, I guess with the total time and a link to the evidence? And then someone else comes along and verifies it? OK, I did one just now... it seems like there should be a more efficient way to do this, since only the admins and "Gurus" here can validate these. I'd suggest lowering the "Guru" threshold to 25,000 mod points (plus a request for "early promotion" that you could reject if you're not impressed with the person's attention to detail), but that would all look rather self-serving since I myself am a megalomaniac who is currently approaching 25,000 mod points.

If you're mainly concerned about anniversaries, then it should definitely be done in batches, highest-ranked first, maybe 1,000 at a time. Then let the Level 6 and higher people add dates for everything else?

I always find your feedback interesting and insightful so thanks for chiming in when you do. Less than five tracks is an ongoing data moderation campaign to check every album on BEA with less than five tracks is over 20 mins. Albums over four tracks are easy to verify by counting the tracks, so this makes sure both qualifying criteria are enforced. It has taken about a year so far to get down from about 8,000 albums to under 5,000 and has led to a (surprisingly small) number of shorter albums being flagged as 'suspect' (which people might sometimes see pop up in the 'year changes' weekly announcements).

As the BEA database gets bigger, adding new fields to capture additional information becomes more arduous (writing this with artist gender and birth/death days on the 2026 roadmap also in mind), so it has to be worth it in the sense that it provides value for end users or facilitates spin-off functionality to be added.

Totally get valid concerns about creating extra work with the small number of people that are active in data moderation, so this could be scaled back a tiny bit to get the most value with the least effort. There’s probably no real point in trying to capture dates for all qualifying albums in the BEA database if their anniversaries will never be celebrated, so we could initially limit this to albums ranked in the top 10,000 (those qualifying by year). Albums beyond that(?) are unlikely to be honoured in the same way, except maybe by true fans of particular artists (dates could still be allowed to be provided by users for other albums, but the dates wouldn’t be seen as 'required'). For the top 10,000, albums could be unlocked in small batches to prompt dates to be added (being careful not to flood the moderation queue), similar to how we originally approached release dates back in the day (thread linked at bottom of original post).
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bojolpif71

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Age: 67

Location: Burgundy

To help users select albums for which they want to add the full release date, an additional filter (something like "full release date missing") could be added to the "top rated albums" selection page. This page already allows users to view the site's most popular albums based on certain search criteria. With this additional filter, users could see albums that need updating and are likely to be of interest to the largest number of BEA users.

albummaster

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bojolpif71 wrote:

To help users select albums for which they want to add the full release date, an additional filter (something like "full release date missing") could be added to the "top rated albums" selection page. This page already allows users to view the site's most popular albums based on certain search criteria. With this additional filter, users could see albums that need updating and are likely to be of interest to the largest number of BEA users.

Agree, a filter will be helpful. I think what'll happen is on the Newly added albums page, the 'Invalid release dates' filter will be adjusted to take into account updated guidelines (albums released since 2004 - as per now - plus the top ranked albums within the threshold rank & released since 1960). This would keep things consistent with how release dates were initially populated with minimal impact to the rest of the site. The threshold rank can be adjusted higher/lower.
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Romanelli

Bone Swah

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Location: Broomfield, Colorado

Moderator

Some of these are showing up in the "Not Moderated" section. Is that in error?
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I'm leaning on the threshold
Of her mystery
And crashing through the walls
Of dying history

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Site Admin

Romanelli wrote:

Some of these are showing up in the "Not Moderated" section. Is that in error?

The process is working like last time (when release dates were originally populated), where a few qualifying albums without release dates will be flagged for updating (if the moderation queue is small enough), up to a max of 12 albums at a time three times per day (this is almost half the previous cadence where the batch size was 15 four times a day).
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Johnnyo

Gender: Male

Age: 67

Location: London Town

I've been working my way through these, as I think others have as well, and we are down to 160 albums still remaining with dates to be added so not far from completing the current batch.