Why I give my albums away

Every so often someone asks me, with a look of genuine concern, why I let people download the GAYFOLK trilogy for free. All three albums in full, plus the singles, no sign-up, no email address, none of those forms promising "exclusive content" that then flood your inbox. You go to mikesaintlouis.com/descargas, or to gayfolkplanet.com, press the button and take them home.

The question usually comes with a second one hidden inside it: aren't you selling yourself short? It's a fair question. So I'll try to answer it without playing the saint, because it isn't saintly.

The drawer idea

I'll start with what I believe, and then get to what I lose.

A song nobody listens to looks an awful lot like a song that doesn't exist. It's written, it's produced, it has its cover and its music video, but if it sits there waiting for someone to pay for it, in practice it's in a drawer. And a drawer is a very comfortable place for a song, and a very sad one too.

I'd rather they travelled. I'd rather someone downloaded an album in Madrid and passed it on to a friend in another country, and that friend put it on their phone and played it at a dinner, and at that dinner someone asked what this was. I can't plan that journey or control it. All I can do is clear the obstacles so it can happen. And the first obstacle, nearly always, is the price. The second is having to sign up.

Signing up strikes me as even worse than charging. Charging is honest: you give something and you ask for something. Asking for an email in exchange for a song is charging without saying so, because that email gets used for something later. I didn't want to do that.

What I lose

I lose money, obviously. I don't know how much, because there's no way of knowing how many people would have paid. But I lose something, and I'm not going to pretend I don't mind. I run my own record label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, and a label has to pay its way at some point too. The music is still on Spotify, Deezer and YouTube, which helps, but free downloads put nothing in the till.

I lose information. Because I don't ask for data, I don't know who downloads the albums. I don't know if it's twenty people or a great many more, or where they're from, or whether they listen or leave them in the downloads folder next to all the PDFs we never open. Sometimes I'd love to know. It's strange to give something away and not know who you gave it to.

And I lose something harder to name, which is perception. Some people think free means worthless. That if you give it away, it's because you don't dare put a price on it. That annoys me, and at the same time I understand where it comes from. We live surrounded by free things that are actually selling us something, so being suspicious of free is almost healthy.

My answer to that isn't an argument. It's the work. In about two years I've released 273 singles and more than 280 music videos that I directed myself. Nobody does that out of laziness. If anyone thinks I give it away because it's worthless, let them listen for a while and decide.

What I gain

I gain music that reaches places I wouldn't know how to take it. That's the main reason, and almost the only one.

I also gain a certain freedom with myself. If I don't put a price on an album, I don't have to justify that price. I don't have to wonder whether the trilogy is worth a set lunch or a cinema ticket. I get out of a conversation with the market that I don't fancy having over every single song.

I gain, I think, a different kind of relationship with whoever's listening. When someone downloads something without giving anything, if they come back it's because they want to. Not because they've paid and feel they have to get their money's worth. That voluntary return feels more valuable to me than a sale, even if you can't put it in a spreadsheet.

And I gain one small, slightly selfish thing. I like to think that on some hard drive, on some old phone, on some forgotten USB stick, there's a copy of «El día de la liberación» (Liberation Day) that will still be there even if every platform shuts down. Downloaded songs outlive catalogues. That comforts me more than I expected.

What I'm not sure about

I don't know if this is sustainable forever. I'll say that plainly. In a while I might change my mind, or find some middle way I haven't thought of. I don't like manifestos that allow no corrections, so this isn't one either.

Nor do I know whether giving it away works the same for every format. With a trilogy designed as a story in three acts, it makes a lot of sense for someone to take the whole thing and listen whenever they like. With a stand-alone single, maybe the download matters less and what matters is that it plays anywhere. I haven't worked that out.

What I am sure about is the priority. Before selling a song, I want the song to move. To leave my computer, to cross an ocean in a WhatsApp message, to play in a kitchen I've never seen. If, after all that, someone wants to support what I do, they'll know how. And if not, the song will still have done its job, which is to get from one place to another.

The albums and singles are at mikesaintlouis.com/descargas.