Year tag is blank for all music whereas in itunes the year is visible.
Where exactly are you seeing this? Which client and where in the interface?
Similar problem has been mentioned in other threads. Using Plex web, track view, the year column does not show any information, even if the tracks contain that info embedded in the tags for the file. You can still use a custom filter, and the tracks will filter to a specific year, but still nothing will populate the year column.
I suspect itās all to do with the new music system, and the apparent move to album based info, instead of track based info for just about everything.
Even worse, in my opinion, you canāt search for an a particular track artist with a custom filter, because you can only search for a an Album Artist (Artist Title) So finding all the tracks by an artist that you know you have several tracks in āVarious Artistsā compilations will not retrieve all of the results. Annoyingly, I can use the basic, generic search in Plex Web, and get all of the tracks, but canāt create a playlist from those results
In fact, the track artist is never shown in the list view unless the track artist is different than the album artist, or if the album artist canāt be found on MusicBrainz. The result is you only see track artist for compilation albums, tracks with an āArtist featuring Another Artistā set in the tags, or an artist that Plex canāt match with MusicBrainz.
Plex really should re-consider the move to album based metadata over track based data. I donāt think itās the way most people expect a music system to work.
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Iāve found that this depends on how old the person is. If you are under 30, you stream your music and think of music as individual songs. If you are over 30 you probably focus on albums because we bought albums, not songs. Iām 59 so you can guess where I fall in this. LOL
Iām 65 in a few days. I listen by tracks, even when I was a kid. Boxes of 45ās that I preferred over albums so that I wasnāt stuck on one artist. Even now I hardly ever play a whole album, preferring to use some method that plays randomly from my library.
Really missing Plex Mixā¦ used it all the time in the good olā days.
In any event. album based metadata is fine, but there are lots of reasons to pay more attention to track based data too. 
Uhmā¦care to read the thread?
This is bit bizarre, as albums are a relatively recent phenomenon. During the first seventy years of recorded music (until the early 1960s) singles were pretty much the only game in town, and 60s doo-wop, 70s disco, 80s house and 90s trance were all massively popular and purely centered on singles, those fans are now all well over 30.
But this has nothing to do with how old or āalbum orientedā you are. Any album for example with tracks in different Genres and/or songs from different Years is not handled correctly in Plex because it assumes this is the same for all tracks on the album.
An Elvis ābest ofā album with songs spanning 30 years? All reduced to one year. A Miles Davis album reissue with bonus tracks from two years earlier? Same. A double album with disc one metal and disc two ambient? The album genres are applied to all tracks. Compilations? Well you can imagineā¦
Having all metadata track-based (which is how the tags are stored in the files anyway), and then dynamically building Albums by grouping tracks with the same Album Artist/Album Name combo solves this problem. Unfortunately, Plex was originally not set up this way.
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I shuffle genre libraries so I get a track at a time of the artists in whatever category I put them in - AFTER I set it up the way Plex wants it ('cause Iām old enough not to want to waste ANY precious time fighting with Plex).
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