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Notes -
I'm going to ping @self_made_human here because my response may be of interest to him. I think it's safe to say that this experiment is over for the time being, and here are my takeaways:
Opus is the best model currently available. It is the only model that recognized the Wikipedia error, and the only one that could tell the difference between 45Cat comments and 45Cat information. It also had the courtesy to tell me when it couldn't access a source.
That being said, data access issues aside, it still made mistakes. It didn't pull the correct FtH date from RYM. For GRoL, it said "As a pre-1978 release, the copyright registration would appear in the physical Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series, Part 5 (Music), likely the July–December 1966 volume." Well, sort of. Sound recordings weren't registered until 1972. The song may have been registered as a composition, but the date of publication wouldn't necessarily be the date of the single's release. A cover, for example, would have been registered with the original recording. This gets even sketchier when we're talking about the days when songs were primarily published as sheet music. Incidentally, the registration date for this (which I hadn't thought to look up until now) is May 2, 1966.
It also says that "[The Copyright] volumes exist on archive.org but text searches did not surface this specific entry, likely due to OCR limitations on the scanned pages." These volumes have been scanned and are available as text files. The OCR isn't particularly good, but it does exist, and there were no issues with this entry.
If this takes 20 minutes and consults 711 sources, what the hell is it doing? There are not 711 reputable sources to consult on first pass, maybe 50, tops. After that the instructions were pretty clear that if it had a Billboard date to work with that. I can understand it doing a deep dive if it couldn't pin down a date, or if the request had been open-ended, but once it found the Billboard review that should have been it. This only takes me a couple minutes to do manually unless there's a really sticky wicket, but that's rare. If the release date is on RYM it takes seconds because that's where I look first. I have no desire to automate a task so as to make it take longer.
It took 2500 words to give me two dates. On the one hand, I appreciate the report. On the other, it's overkill, especially when it was mostly peripheral information like what the lead single was and who did the mastering. This is a minor quibble, but there's something ironic about automating a task and it taking longer to read the output than to look up the answer myself. I don't mind as much as this is testing, but if I were to actually use this I'd trust it enough to just spit out dates.
The lack of data access is a big issue and might make this whole LLM thing unfeasible. If LLMs can't access data without workarounds, then their utility is limited. Three of the most important archives for this project—US Copyright, Archive.org, and ARSA—are evidently excluded. There are other ones that aren't relevant to this particular exercise but that I suspect would suffer from similar problems. Instead it's relying primarily on Billboard, and that stops working when you get to a release that wasn't reviewed in Billboard and didn't chart. A fourth site, the normally reliable RYM, also had data access issues. The site's API has been in development for years and is pretty much vaporware at this point, and they aggressively block scrapers, Anthropic's included. My guess is that whatever Anthropic is using to scrape their data is getting only partial pulls before getting shut out, and the result is that it can't be relied on to have the most updated data.
I tried to make it easy for the LLM by allowing it to rely on Wikipedia and RYM dates, and Claude, to its credit, caught the Wikipedia error. But that was an obvious error. When doing some followup work I found an error on RYM, and I'm less confident that Claude could have caught it (I'm honestly surprised it got past the mods). What happened was I was looking up copyright dates for the other albums Claude mentioned as being released around the same time as FtH, one of which was Love Trippin' by The Spinners. Claude gives a release date of 5/27/1980. The copyright date, however, is 6/2/1980. I list the copyright dates as secondary because they occasionally contradict a well-established release date, but I give them high reliability, so I wanted to investigate the May 27 date further, so I looked at the update notes from RYM. The citation was to an unsourced Wikipedia page, so I have no idea where that date came from. I might be tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt, except, that update was made just last year. Prior to that, RYM listed the release date as June 1980, and the source for that was liner notes from a CD boxed set. While Claude correctly pointed out an issue with the liner notes to a Turtles CD, they are, for all intents and purposes, as official as a source can get. If I have that and a copyright date suggesting a June release, I'm going with a June release when the only evidence to the contrary is an unsourced Wikipedia article. To be fair, this is not something I would have normally caught on my own. However, if an LLM is doing this deep a dive, I would expect it to catch that mistake.
@ZorbaTHut +
I think the problem is using research for this. It's tuned for producing formatted papers. I've taken a different approach. I opened Claude code with opus 4.6, copy and pasted the content of this and the previous thread into a .txt file in an otherwise empty repository and gave it this prompt:
I'll check back when it's done designing the architecture. Are there some other records I could feed it once it designs a process? otherwise I'll try some random ones.
trial run against
The Shoes - "Present Tense"
The Myddle Class - "Don't Let Me Sleep Too Long"
The Standells - "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White"
Pavlov's Dog - "Pampered Menial"
results: RELEASE 1: The Shoes - "Present Tense"
DATE: September 18, 1979 (Tuesday) METHOD: Rule 2 — Full date from RateYourMusic (reputable source) CONFIDENCE: Medium
KEY EVIDENCE:
SOURCES THAT COULD NOT BE ACCESSED: US Copyright Office (publicrecords.copyright.gov — JavaScript SPA, inaccessible), RYM (403, but search snippets confirmed date), Billboard PDFs (too large to fetch remotely)
NOTES: The Copyright Office would give a definitive answer (Rule 4, post-1978) but was inaccessible. RYM is the best available reputable source. Sept 18 (Tuesday) is a plausible pre-1982 release day. The competing Sept 15 date is from streaming metadata supplied decades later.
RELEASE 2: The Myddle Class - "Don't Let Me Sleep Too Long"
DATE: Monday, July 25, 1966 METHOD: Rule 6b — Monday before earliest confirmed ARSA chart date (WTRY, July 29, 1966) CONFIDENCE: Medium-Low
KEY EVIDENCE:
July 22 but that survey is missing from ARSA)VALIDATION FLAG: The computed date of July 25 does NOT fall within the June 1966 month listed by 45Cat and Wikipedia. This likely means either: (a) the single was released in June but took several weeks to build airplay in Albany before charting in late July, or (b) earlier ARSA entries exist on stations not checked (the agent could only search 3 stations without full ARSA login access). The actual release date may be earlier, in June 1966 as the reputable sources indicate.
SOURCES THAT COULD NOT BE ACCESSED: ARSA full database search (requires login), RYM (403), Discogs (403), Billboard archives for this specific single
RELEASE 3: The Standells - "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White"
DATE: Monday, July 4, 1966 METHOD: Rule 6d — Earlier of ARSA-derived and Billboard-derived dates (ARSA wins) CONFIDENCE: Medium
KEY EVIDENCE:
NOTES: July 4, 1966 was Independence Day, which is unusual for a release date. However, the methodology computes this mechanically. The ARSA entries were identified via Google indexing of ARSA URLs (the site itself was down), so they couldn't be directly verified. If July 11 is correct, the computed date stands. The Standells were an LA-based band, so KBLA picking it up first is geographically logical.
SOURCES THAT COULD NOT BE ACCESSED: ARSA (site down, data found via Google index), 45Cat (403), RYM (403)
RELEASE 4: Pavlov's Dog - "Pampered Menial"
DATE: February 5, 1975 (Wednesday) METHOD: Rule 5 — US Copyright publication date (Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1972-1978) CONFIDENCE: High
KEY EVIDENCE:
NOTES: The copyright publication date of February 5, 1975 is the most authoritative source available. The blog claim of April 4 likely confuses the ABC release with the later Columbia reissue, or is simply incorrect. The Wikipedia/Grokipedia "February 1975" corroborates the copyright date. The registration confirms the original label was ABC Records (ABCD-866), not Columbia.
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