Are you ok with musical tweaks after release?

Blog Published March 15th 2016

It has happened to me a few times. I’ve dropped a track to the Internet and then, later, made a couple of changes to improve the track. Usually, about 5 people have heard the track by then, so it’s not a real big problem for me to delete the first version and replace it with the new version, without anyone really knowing.

Kanye West Tweaks The Life Of Pablo

To my surprise, Kanye West, apparently, has done the same. After releasing “The Life of Pablo” to Tidal earlier this year, a fan noticed that certain songs have received some changes. Kanye made a couple of corrections in lyrics and adjusted some levels in the mix. Completely in line with some of Kanye tweets.

Making Alterations

I’d never thought about this before, but with streaming it’s easy for artists to keep working on their music, even after its release. Listeners are only tuning into the content, but are never downloading it to store it anywhere, which always allows the artist to access the ‘master’ file, which is now a digital sound file.

Because the original file always remains on the server. You can then easily change the content or completely replace the file with something new without the listener even knowing you’ve done so.

Will Music Creation Ever Be Finished?

This allows really cool things, like an altered version of a song due to an event. However, as Kanye actually shows, it also causes a problem. Artists are usually pushed by release dates to finish the music. In most cases, it’s necessary, because music is actually very rarely really finished. If there’s no set release date, the music might never come out at all.

In Strive For Perfection

I’ve recently seen the Spike Lee documentary that accompanies the reissue of Michael Jackson’s “Off The Wall”, which stated that most producers were blown away by Michael’s sense of timing, delivery and music ability, but all of them said that Michael always felt like he could make a song better. He never stopped tweaking and always wondered if he could do something different. This striving for perfection is something I see in many artists, including myself.

This has always taught me to view an album as a timestamp. That one moment in time, where the recording was done that particular way, but usually you’ll rarely hear it in that version ever again.

When artists perform live, you usually already notice they tweaked a song since their recording. Sometimes, it’s purely for their own entertainment. If a song’s a hit, they are singing that song countless times, so they want to change something to make it more exciting for themselves. But in other cases, they finally have the freedom to rework the track to the version they’ve always wanted to do in the first place, but never had a chance to.

Would You Be OK With Changes In Your Music Streams?

So, how do you as a listener feel about this? Music could be changing while you are enjoying it. Is this an exciting thought? Or would you then rather have a download of the file, to make sure it just stays the way you’ve heard it?