I've received a few questions regarding if I offer mastering services and here are my thoughts. Note that this is all from an independent engineer perspective where the artist pays for the production and release. If I did more label work, sending songs to be mastered by someone else would probably be a non-optional quality control step to validate the investment that the label has made in the production process. By no means do I think mastering is bad per se, but times have changed, budgets have changed and technology has changed.

My viewpoint is that a mix should be as release ready as possible. While it's great to get mixes mastered by a professional mastering engineer, this can be quite expensive. My personal experience is also that the benefits from mastering is not proportional to the cost. Using a cheap mastering engineer is something I definitely don't recommend as this is more likely to dilute the purpose of the song, especially if you really like the sound of the mix and want to keep it as is. Important side note: If you're not happy with the mix, remix it! A less experienced (hence cheaper) mastering engineer is, in my experience, more likely to apply too much processing to the song to validate getting paid rather than really focusing on what the song actually needs. Of course there are good budget friendly mastering engineers out there but I think you're better off asking the mixing engineer to finalize the track, especially if you're on a limited budget. Mastering doesn't have to be a separate step from mixing, if mixing (and mastering) is performed by the same engineer anyway, I'd say it's more of a workflow and mindset shift.

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I view the mastering as an extension of mixing, ensuring that the artistic intent is fulfilled and the track is technically compliant to the standards of the real world. If those objectives are achieved in the mixing stage, mastering is not something that needs to be considered unless you put your hard-earned money into a really good mastering engineer just to be sure.

Any engineer comfortable enough to mix a song for a client should be able to master the song. This could mean doing nothing if the mix sounds perfect or applying EQ, compression, saturation, limiting etc to fulfill the artistic intent. Editing and applying fades is also traditionally done in mastering but all of this can just as easily be done in the final stages of the mixing process.

Now, if you have mixes that you feel lack something and are considering getting them mastered to fix them, consider to remix them instead, this will have a much larger impact in getting the song sounding and feeling right.