As a long time collector the original release date has always been important to me for at least a couple reasons. Take a jazz artist like Miles Davis as a simple example whose work spans 4 decades. Knowing where a particular album falls historically within his body of work has more relevance / usefulness in my opinion than a reissue date that will continue to change over & over. Additionally, original release dates really help keep things in perspective for those of us that have been listening obsessively for years. It used to be easy to know approximately where music fit in to the historic timeline because we knew when we purchased the album or cd. In the digital realm everything becomes a blur and it is difficult to know what is old & what is new because there is no longer the historic reference points that may have helped in the past. Perhaps its the sheer volume of music that is available digitally that makes it difficult to keep straight where in the physical realm when the music lived on an album it was easier to know when it came out.

This leads to my next request which would be to include the album label or publisher in the tag. In the old days of diving into the collection there were always labels that you came to expect a certain quality or aesthetic that gave you an idea what you were getting into. Original Jazz Classics, Blue Note, Rune Grammofon, Fax, Made to Measure, Axiom, Hat Art, EM:T, ECM, etc. to name just a a few had a consistent artwork that made it easy to walk over to the wall of cds and pull something out that would fit the mood. Being able to browse the digital collection in a similar fashion would be awesome.