Yes, but you're usually more interested in when the song came out than when the album came out.
If you sort your playlist by date so you can pick songs from the 90's, you probably wanted to hear something like Nirvana instead of The Best of The Who: Volume 3.
I agree that year is screwed up, but some taggers (like the picard-lastfm tagger) reads also decade feel tags. So music that sounds like 90s is tagged as 90s music, even if it isn't recorded in 90s.
For example, ""La Roux -- In It For The Kill"" will get the song tagged as sounding 80s like:
If you sort your playlist by date so you can pick songs from the 90's, you probably wanted to hear something like Nirvana instead of The Best of The Who: Volume 3.