When a musician changes his/her/its name (through marriage or sex change or a big ego) we're pretty consistent in renaming and aliasing that person.
Why can't we do the same with band names?

I think it would very neat to add some level of abstraction where we can define that Golden Earring and Golden Earrings are in fact the same band. They just dropped the s somewhere down the road, but it's still the same band. I would love to see the combined lineup history available on this site.

The same goes for Thin Lizzie and Thin Lizzy, Lynard Skynard and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Lucifer's Heritage and Blind Guardian, Purgatory and Iced Earth, etc...

I know it's not always clear whether a new band name was just a name change or really a new band, but it still would be a cool feature to have.

A feature like this could really resolve one of our favorite old debates, like http://www.bandtoband.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10003 and others.

How would you suggest that we handle albums released under both names?

http://www.bandtoband.com/artist/mark-hoppus (two Cheshire cat entries)

http://www.bandtoband.com/artist/lou-barlow (two You're Living All Over Me entries)

http://www.bandtoband.com/artist/mike-tirelli (two No Turning Back entries)

I guess from a technical/database design point of view it's definitely possible - if you start from scratch, that is. Implementing it in the current design is probably asking for trouble.

Also, those double album entries could be represented twice; just like Whitesnake's Slide It In appears twice already and the (almost) triple representation of Beautiful Creatures' Deuce.

I disagree.

If the band changes its name, even only by adding or dropping an 's', it's a name change for me.

I would, however, favour aliasing for a range of 'and', 'with', 'plus' and possessive varaints that we could define.

I was thinking about a feature like "This band changed its name to Golden Earring. Click here to see the full lineup history."