I have noticed the same thing with two recent releases; Muse’s Drones and Blur’s Magic Whip. In both cases all songs uploaded except those which had been pre-released as singles which matched instead. However, I don’t think this is new behaviour and have seen it with new releases before, and I have a theory why.
Lat year I bought The Beatles Rubber Soul album. This album 100% matched when I put it into iTunes, but I noticed that there was an audio glitch on the Matched download of one song that wasn’t present on either the CD or the ripped copy. I searched these forums to see if anyone else had glitches on their matches, and found a discussion thread dedicated to this same glitch on the same song from Rubber Soul. Everyone who listed to a matched copy had the same glitch at the same position on the same song. What was interesting was that some posters said that they had purchased the same track from iTunes and that there was no glitch. This suggested that iTunes keeps two copies of each song in it’s library; one version for purchasing, and another for matching. Don’t know why this would be; perhaps something so simple as needing different metadata on each.
Anyway my theory is that there are these two versions of each album, and that iTunes needs to release the purchased version on time, to coincide with the general album release date. However, the matched copy is made available later (perhaps a few weeks to months, looking at the results in this thread). There’s probably no intentional reason for that delay, they just get to it when they can.
With that in mind, you might want to try re-matching in a few weeks time and you might have better success. I tried re-matching an album this morning that I bought last year when it was a new release. Last year when I tried matching it, it had just uploaded (apart from pre-released singles); sure enough this morning it matched straight away.
