Musicians with march birthdays explained with examples

A round-number anniversary is the only moment most birth dates ever get checked. In music that moment comes round on a schedule, because the industry retrospects by the calendar: a centenary, a fiftieth year since a recording, a tenth since a death. Each is an occasion, and every occasion is built on a date that is printed on everything before anyone has looked at a register.

What to take away

• Anniversary programming, reissues and tributes fix a date in public whether or not it was right.
• The anniversary is also when archives get reopened, so it is when errors are found. Corrections arrive in bursts, decades apart.
• A group's anniversary and a member's birthday are different kinds of date and should never share a field.

Why music runs on anniversaries

The anniversary is the industry's unit of retrospection. Each one is a reason for a reissue, a broadcast season, a concert or a plaque. The date at the center of it is chosen months ahead, and for that year it becomes the most repeated fact about the person.

That has two effects on the record. It pins the date: every item produced for the occasion carries it, and a compiler who checks later finds a hundred agreeing sources that are one source. And it pays for research. Somebody preparing an archival edition goes back to the documents, and that is when the date turns out to have been wrong all along.

The burst pattern

Moment	What happens to the date
During the career	A press date circulates and nobody checks it
First round anniversary	Programming repeats the press date at scale
Archival edition	A researcher finds the register; the correction appears in a booklet few people read
Later anniversaries	Some sources carry the corrected date, most carry the old one, and both look authoritative
Centenary	The correction is finally adopted, or buried again under a new wave of the old date

A directory that finds two dates for a musician should ask where each source sits in this cycle. The later, less-copied date is often the researched one.

Two kinds of date, one column

Groups have formation dates, first-performance dates and first-release dates. Members have birth dates. Public databases store all of these, and a surprising number put a group's founding date in the same field a person's birth date goes in, because the schema was designed for people. The result is a "birthday" for a band and, in the other direction, a musician whose birth date has been overwritten with the date the band formed. Once that swap has happened it is copied like any other value, and nothing on the page marks it as the wrong kind of date. The January musicians' page covers the identifiers that keep the two apart.

Using anniversaries without being used by them

• Treat anniversary material as a secondary source. It repeats a date; it did not establish one.
• Look for the archival edition and read the booklet. That is where the primary work is reported.
• Record where a source sits in the anniversary cycle, not only its year of publication.
• Never let a group's anniversary supply a member's date, or the reverse.
• For a living musician, the anniversary of a debut is publishable and a birthday is not. The site marks the month and stops, as the March index explains.

The famous-February page traces how a wrong date enters a record in the first place. This page is about what keeps it there. The by-day index for February shows a related case where a date's rarity, rather than its fame, decides how it is handled.

Common questions

Are anniversary dates more often wrong than others?

They are more often repeated, which makes an error harder to see and a correction harder to spread. Being checked at the centenary makes them, in the end, more often right.

Should a directory adopt a corrected date the moment an archival edition publishes it?

It should record it, with the source, and show the change. Overwriting the old value with no note is exactly the failure that lets the old value come back at the next anniversary.

Why is a band's formation date not a birthday?

Because nothing was born. It is an event date of a different type, and the January index requires the type to be stated on every entry.