Also released on this day
From the racks
Three things about release dates.
An album can have three different birthdays
Ask two people when a record came out and you can get two honest answers. For most of the history of the business a release was scheduled country by country: an album might reach British shops on a Monday and American ones on the Tuesday, and a Japanese pressing could arrive weeks either side with a bonus track on it.
Then there is the difference between the day a record was finished and the day anyone could buy it, which for a contract dispute can run to years. And there is the reissue — remastered, expanded, on vinyl again — which gets its own date and is often the one a shop's database knows.
The date here is the earliest release anywhere, which is the one most likely to match what a discography says and least likely to match what you remember from your own record shop.
Why so many albums come out on a Friday
Because in July 2015 the industry agreed to make it so. Until then release day was a national habit — Monday in the United Kingdom, Tuesday in the United States, Friday in Germany and Australia — which meant a record was on sale in one country for days before another, and every one of those days was a day it could be copied and passed around.
Global Release Day moved the whole world to Friday. If you are looking at a date after 2015 and it is a Friday, that is why. If you are looking at something from the seventies, the day of the week tells you which market the label cared about most.
It also means anniversaries drift. An album released on a Friday in 1996 has its thirtieth anniversary on a Tuesday, and nobody schedules a reissue for a Tuesday.
The quietest day of the year
It is —, with — albums to its name in this list, against a year that averages — a day.
December as a whole runs at about — a day, and the slide is steady rather than sudden: around — records on the first of the month, single figures by the third week, almost nothing on Christmas Day itself.
Nothing wants to be released into the week when everybody is already listening to what they were given. The trade puts its big records on the shelf in October and November, in time to be bought, and then goes quiet until the middle of January.