First release year of an album's track with Musicbrainz?

Hi there,

Today I wanted to import a compilation by artist Al Stewart, ["A Piece of Yesterday: The Anthology"](https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/185572cc-d7a7-436d-bed6-7641515c2834), which was released in 2006. Consequently, all the tracks on this album are also tagged with release year 2006 now. However, these songs have been released over the past 50 years, with the oldest songs from the '60s. Tagging a song from 1978 with 2006 just seems wrong to me here - is there a way, to get a track's very first release year into the library and the file's tags? The `original_date:`option doesn't appear to work here, because I want a particular track's original date, and not a release/release-group's original date…

Would I need to update the MB database in order to achieve this? If so, would it suffice to link the songs in question to an MB "work" and beets would fetch the work's original release date?

Start by reviewing beets' MusicBrainz matching and date-field handling, then verify whether MusicBrainz provides a track's first release year rather than only release or release-group dates. The work is done when that track-level year can be retrieved, stored in the library, and written to file tags with documented behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.