Wikipedia (& other online music databases) vs. the "Recording Industry Association of America". When wanting to know exact, accurate information about music (such as the exact release date of an album), who can someone really trust?

1

Rate Your Music

I'm very familiar with Discogs and it is one of the platforms I use to cross-reference information like this. Yet there isn't necessarily a reason for me to believe it over Wikipedia or rateyourmusic.com as it is also a community ran, feedback based platform in which people find outside sources (for example, a year of release date on a physical vinyl record), and input that information on the album's page. However, if this is the sort of proof that the same people on Wikipedia or rateyourmusic.com use, they are purporting different results when the release dates vary from platform to platform. Also, while I can't find a specific example off the top of my head, I have run into the problem of Discogs only having the release year of an album and not the month or day, whereas Wikipedia or rateyourmusic.com did have the release month and day. This brings me to the problem I point out in my original post, who should I trust above all others when different platforms give me different answers? (rhetorical question) Its pretty simple and reliable to track down the year that an album was released, but to want a specific month or day gets tricky.

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2

Letterboxd

I'll try to keep this short (1-2 minute read). As a massive fan of music, I have spent the last few years attempting to catalogue every song I "like" or am familiar with onto a spreadsheet, complete with columns dedicated to listing accurate information for each song such as: the artist the song is by, the album (or release if a single/EP) the song is from, the first date at which the song was available to the public (aka release date), genres the songs belong to, my personal tier-list rating, etc. There are thousands of songs, because I intend it to be the music equivalent of a platform like letterboxd.com (which is for movies and some TV shows), listing every song in my library (Spotify "Liked Songs", etc.) and every song I am familiar with but don't necessarily enjoy. Due to how many additional columns of data I have for each song, the spreadsheet will eventually become in the hundreds of thousand of words of information. As such, I want to ensure the information provided is objective and as accurate or exact as possible based on resources available on the good ol' world wide web.

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3

AllMusic

My problem comes when trying to answer questions like: When did [album name] come out? Wikipedia will, ~99% of the time, have an exact year and month, and usually day of the month as well, in which the album was first released to the public. I can cross examine these dates on other leading music database platforms such as rateyourmusic.com or allmusic.com, but about half of the time the information is contrasting between different sources, usually only a few days of the week, or perhaps by a month or two. For example, Wikipedia will have an album's release date as July 1st, 1983 (with its source some website that is no longer available even via the waybackmachine), vs. rateyourmusic.com which will have an album's release date as September 10th, 1983. So which is it? The VAST majority of the time, there would be a concrete answer, but due to the fact that the longer time goes by, and the further back you look in terms of how early something existed in the Information Age, the less quantifiable and accurate data on things like music will be.

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