Talk:Stereotomy

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Release date and why it's December

So ... here I will try to settle some confusion as best I can, including taking some of the blame for said confusion.

Several (many??) years ago, this page was lacking release month information for Stereotomy. There was always some confusion as all the copyrights are 1985, but the first published charts (And the AP website) were in January of 1986. The later remaster of Stereotomy also makes reference to both 1985 and 1986. There was, as far as I know, no official record kept of the date that we can find now. I even emailed Arista about it but got no response.

Having limited information, but knowing that sometimes albums release in some markets earlier than others, I looked up all the pages I could find, with all their different release date claims, and posted the earliest mentioned, November 1985. It was not the most official of sources, maybe even someone guessing ... but it was the best I could find. I was confident someone else here would know if that was incorrect.

Unfortunately, the date stuck on here, and webcrawlers and other sites started using that month as well. Now there are several sites claiming the very same date (15 November) and, interestingly, using the very same format. They seem to be using the same "brain," and the brain serms to have gotten their inforation from here and picked the 15th as it's right in the middle.

Unfortunately still, with much more information available now, we see that December, and not November, is all but proven to be the actual release month.

A review posted in a music journal (I need to find it again to post it here) states Stereotomy was released only ten months after Vulture Culture. That timeframe puts Stereotomy's release in mid-December, but that's not really proof enough to post on an encyclopedic article.

The album charts from the different countries will not lie. Unless an album fails to chart upon release and slowly rises up, it hits right away. But the charts are delayed at least one week, and usually 2-3 or even longer, as they cover airplay and album sales during one-week or two-week chunks, then there is the time it takes for the data to be reported, analyzed, typed, sent to be printed, then finally distributed with the intended publishing date.

The earliest reports of Stereotomy were from the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden, appearing on the chart printed and published 1986-01-04, 06, and 08.

Here's a link to the Dutch page: https://dutchcharts.nl/showitem.asp?interpret=The+Alan+Parsons+Project&titel=Stereotomy&cat=a

We see the album popped up pretty high on the chart (#22) before peaking at 13 abs then sliding down, with its last week at 67.

The delay between release and published sales chart for Vulture Culture, in these markets, was 15, 17, and 21 days, respectively. If this delay holds the same for Stereotomy (as it seems to have for Gaudi), we get a release date somewhere between the 18th and 20th of December (give or take a couple days). Intetestingly, one web source claims December 19 as the original release date. A very specific number, but I could not verify the truth of that claim. Maybe it is here. Regardless, a November Stereotomy release looks impossible.

• • Edit: Another user has posted a source of a "new albums" list for the week following December 14, further proof that this is the correct release week.**

In the United States, comparing known release dates with their earliest chart appearances landing the same time as Stereotomy, the delay could have been anywhere between 18 and 36 days. The US (and Canadian) chart debut was 1986-02-01.

Stereotomy released in Week 3 December 1985 in Europe, and then most likely in early January 1986 in North American (and perhaps other) markets.

This info, to my mind at least, goes a long way toward explaining the confusion, and how we can be reasonably certain that December 1985 absolutely must be correct, even if we may never know the exact day within that month.

MXVN (talk) 03:24, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

I checked the Music Week publication on the World Radio History database, and you are indeed correct: the publication lists the European released date in the middle of December. You can find this information on page 21. It gives a range of release dates from December 16th to December 20th, given that not all albums in the UK were released on the same day at that time.