I don't know the best way to word this, and I don't think it would apply much to classical and traditional works, but having a way to denote the original recording(s) of a song could be immensely useful from a data standpoint.

the main example that comes to my mind is when there's many remixes of a song (and in this case and others, remixes of remixes of a song) it might become unclear which recordings are considered the original version.

maybe there's a better way of doing this, but a possible solution could be a new work attribute