How do I find info on albums released in 1996?

November 17, 2005 10:27 AM

How do I find out what albums were released in 1996?

I want to get together a (very selective) list of albums released in 1996. I've gotten a start by looking at this Wikipedia article, and creating a smart playlist in my iTunes where Year=1996, but I would like to get a lot farther. Pop charts won't help because I want it to be indie/alternative/college-radio-oriented. Most of the stuff I was listening to in 1996 is on my CD shelf, not in iTunes, and I don't want to look through 1000+ CDs for release dates if I can avoid it. Amazon doesn't seem to have a year option in their advanced search on the web site. If Amazon web services provides a way to look this up, I'm skilled enough to write some code to grab it. I don't think KEXP charts go that far back, and I have thrown out out all my old copies of Puncture and Option magazine.

All creative options welcomed. Also, feel free to post some of your favorites here.

posted by matildaben to media & arts (8 comments total)

Advanced search on Allmusic.com has year of release functionality, but you also are required to give style of music limiting your final result.
posted by rabbitsnake at 10:36 AM on November 17, 2005

KALX Top 35 New Release playlists for 1996 (KALX is the UC Berkeley radio station)
posted by cmonkey at 10:57 AM on November 17, 2005

I was wrong about KEXP Charts.
posted by matildaben at 11:32 AM on November 17, 2005

I thought CDDB might work for this.
posted by scazza at 11:39 AM on November 17, 2005

Not sure whether this will help you, but rateyourmusic.com has a "top albums by year" page, which lists the top-rated albums each year from 1950 to present. They've got some indy stuff, and you might be able to screen-scrape the album detail pages if you know what you're looking for.
posted by adrian_h at 2:36 PM on November 17, 2005

Wikipedia might be a start.
posted by S.C. at 7:33 PM on November 17, 2005

Oh good god. Did I seriously not see that link in the question?
posted by S.C. at 7:34 PM on November 17, 2005

Well, this prompted me to finally register at allmusic and check out their advanced search. It appears that you can search on a genre (you have to pick a subgenre, like "indie rock") and a year of release, but I couldn't get it to work in Firefox. YMMV.
posted by dhartung at 1:37 AM on November 19, 2005