The other night I was discussing an impending album release from a local band: as is invariably the case with skint unsigned acts the CDs would be duplicated by the band themselves and sold at gigs. I was offered a sample CD to take home but with the caveat “but it’ll still change”. A bit of discussion ensued and we came to the conclusion that left unchecked their album would keep on changing, evolving, and effectively no two batches produced would the same: comments from listeners such as ‘oh the drums are a bit loud’ might result in a balance change, or ‘that cowbell doesn’t fit there’ could mean an arrangement alteration. Put simply: there would never be a ‘final version’, even after the album launch gig, and it would be a perpetual ‘demo’.
Now, I am a firm believer of a release being ‘a point in time’ for an act, a snapshot if you will. When you bite the bullet and submit your track to get an ISRC (basically a barcode) you need to submit the exact track you are releasing, and when you have physical media duplicated then that’s where you draw the line: a hundred copies are etched and that’s it, no going back, no ‘tweaks’. Effectively you as a band or act are forced to draw that big black line on the mix, warts and all – that’s what separates the demo from the release.
Yet with home manufacturing it’s all too easy for a band to change things after-the-event, and it does a great disservice to the people who have been to (say) your launch party and bought a copy. Many new performers and young acts are too impatient to release their new tracks, so version-upon-version is published to Soundcloud (or whatever music-site-du-jour) spoiling the impact. As a band/act you’ll never be completely happy with something because after all your tastes evolve and your hearing changes, but that’s no reason to rewrite history.
There are some wonderful examples of ‘slightly broken’ performances out there – off the top of my head Minnie Riperton, David Bowie, The Beatles, Barry Manilow and even Scott Joplin have recorded imperfect versions which have a charm to them. Many of those would have been lost had it been easy to ‘evolve’ a track and I think we’d have been worse off for it.
As an extreme case I can cite an artiste whose second album consisted 40% of slightly reworked/reproduced versions of tracks from her first album. Her third album was 50% reworked/revised tracks from her first and second albums. Goodness knows what the fourth contained but I’ve stopped buying her albums now – I might as well wait for the seventh or eighth so I can hear some new work.
Mind, I’ve not been exempt from this in continued adventures with Obvious Pseudonym: 18 months ago we released The Six Noises EP, then a week after I’d the master copies had been dispatched I tweaked it into a ‘Special Edition’ version correcting lots of little mistakes I’d noticed since the band listening-party. Thankfully the original run of CD production was cancelled so we didn’t have to deal with physical copies, but still the iTunes version was different from the CD version in small, subtle ways (I believe the CD version is superior but you may have a different opinion). Nowadays I sit on a mix for at least a month and will go back and listen to it with fresh ears some weeks after it’s been mixed or frequently longer, eg. I noticed a slight mis-timing in the piano track on Baby Baby just the other week… 16 months after I recorded it.
In short? Don’t rush a release, give it time, but draw a line and wave goodbye to a recording once it’s flown the nest – don’t keep picking at it. Your fans will – eventually – thank you.
Edit: As @mattbluefoot points out: ‘This could be paraphrased as “don’t be George Lucas”‘. 
