Talk:There Goes the Neighborhood (album)

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Can I suggest to editors of this article that you consider reading the advice to new editors on how to write your first article. Your article should have a lead. This is a single paragraph that tells your reader all the essentials, you can then get into overdubs and incomplete tracks and final mixes once your reader actually understands what on earth you are talking about and is able to decide whether he even wants to know more. Cottonshirt (talk) 06:07, 22 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Release Date of This Album

This seems to be a matter of contention. It was previously March 10th, 1981 and there are sources indicating that this is indeed the release date, although there is some debate about their reliability. It was updated by another editor Jeckylback to be May 15th. Then another editor, Richard3120 has stated that May 15th is not verifiable, but it was sometime in May and it definitely wasn't March. Hoping to discuss this issue here. ThereWillBeTime (talk) 01:18, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And I guess maybe just some help from you, Richard3120. Do you have any suggestions of a good way I could view the citation you added saying that album was released in May? This is my first time encountering a citation that is a magazine from 1981. ThereWillBeTime (talk) 01:26, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Just adding a source here that I think supports the notion that May was indeed the release date. Billboard charts June 13, 1981 We can see the Walsh album on the charts, and it had been there for 4 weeks. While this of course is not a definitive release date for the album, it puts my mind at ease that May 1981 is correct :) Richard3120, sorry for pinging you so much! ThereWillBeTime (talk) 01:43, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi ThereWillBeTime, no problem at all – you are right, I should have explained things a bit better. You can see the discussion on my talk page in this thread and the one immediately below it. Jeckylback changed the date from the original March 10, 1981 to May 15, 1981, based on the fact a CD reissue of an Eagles album states the release date to be May 15. I totally agree that March 10 is not the release date, because the date of first entry onto the Billboard charts was May 16 [1], and it makes no sense for a new album by a well known artist to not chart for over two months after the release date, and then suddenly be successful.

My disagreement with Jeckylback was that May 15 wasn't likely to be the release date either, regardless of what the record label sleeve says, because it charted the following day on May 16, and in the 1970s it would have been impossible to release a record, collect the sales and the airplay data manually (no computers or internet at the time) from all over the USA at the end of the day, spend all night adding them up, create the charts, print ten of thousands of copies of the magazine, distribute them all over the country, and have it on the news-stands by the following morning. In any case, even though that issue of Billboard is dated May 16, that wouldn't have been the publication date – that was a "week ending" date, and it would normally have gone on sale the previous Tuesday or Wednesday, i.e. May 12 or May 13, so before the album had even been released, if it had been May 15.

It's far more likely that it was released the week before that, in order to collect a full week's sales and have the chart tabulated for the next week. And there's evidence that this was the case. In the issue of Billboard dated May 2, 1981, we can see that the album was "set for release early this month" [2]. And it was reviewed as a "Top Album Pick" the following week, May 9 [3]. So it was very likely released during the week ending May 9. Given that most album releases at the time were on Tuesdays, my guess is that the album was released on Tuesday May 5, 1981, which would tie up with its chart entry the following week. However, this is just a guess on my part, so it's WP:OR and I put "May 1981" as a compromise for the release date, since I can't prove the exact date. But we have enough reliable evidence to say it was definitely in that month, not March 1981. Richard3120 (talk) 14:42, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for being patient about my pings, and thanks for the very through response, too. I actually left a note on Jeckylback's talk page wrt the release date. According to some research I did, the album was released in the States on May 10th, and a Canadian version of the LP was released on May 15th, so that may explain that confusion :)ThereWillBeTime (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 20:31, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@ThereWillBeTime: May 10 doesn't sound likely to me either... that was a Sunday and many shops would have been closed, why would you release your album on a day when people couldn't buy it? Richard3120 (talk) 21:10, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, that's a fair question :)I don't have a good answer to it. I wasn't very old when this record was released, and personally, I don't have a good sense for the general dates people would release records. These sources in question are discogs, which, you know, are not reliable sources for Wikipedia so I'm not taking that date as gospel or anything. Perhaps it's simply what was printed in the sleeve? I can't recall your exact conversation with Jecky, it was very dense, but I have a faint recollection of him mentioning a sleeve. But seeing the May 15th release date on the Canadian release of the album on discogs made me wonder if that what was informing Jeckylback's opinon.ThereWillBeTime (talk) 21:15, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not American so I can't speak from personal experience, but I know Tuesdays used to be the most common release day of the week in the USA at the time... in the UK it used to be Friday. As stated, Jeckylback's release date came from the sleeve notes of another Eagles' record... this may be where the Discogs editor got it from as well, it may even have been Jeckylback who added it, because anyone can edit Discogs... that's why we don't use it as a reliable source, anyone can edit it and there's no proof that what they have added is correct or any source for their edits. Richard3120 (talk) 21:20, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, absolutely no debate from my side of the room about the reliability of Discogs - it is undeniable an unreliable source. Sorry, I was more mentioning the dates I saw on discogs as a fun fact or just casual observation, and I'm not suggesting any of this data should inform the article, but instead, just throwing it out as a bit of trivia. Pardon if that's out of place in the discussion! ThereWillBeTime (talk) 21:24, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]