I just received a CD to review and when I checked Bandcamp (to make importing easier) I saw the following:
The CD I received was just Part 1, being tracks 1 - 6. Tracks 7 - 12 comprise Part 2 (not sure if that will be released on CD) and, here it comes, released one at a time. (Track 7 was released recently, most likely August 2.)
The CD is easy, but how does one enter this Bandcamp release with a changing track listing?
I wouldn’t split this up into individual releases. If you buy now, you will get the complete album, although not all tracks are available yet.
Last year’s release of Peter Gabriel was actually released in a similar way - in parts, each track also released as a preceding single. At one point it was possible to purchase the whole album (“pre-order”), with the possibility to download all the tracks released up to that point.
The missing tracks became available as soon as they were released, with the last ones at the time of the actual album release.
In this case, it’s not called “pre-order”, but it’s quite similar. I would add one release with all tracks, released, when the album is complete - the rest goes to an annotation. Of course, in this case you would have to use placeholders, if you like to enter it now.
Download releases are just as important to catalogue.
They are sometimes (as in this case) interesting on their own merit, or different from CD releases.
This is especially the case if this CD is an unpublished sampler. The download is the format most people will encounter. The CD is the oddity.