Releasing on every platform without a record company behind you: the practical side

My name has an apostrophe in an odd place. Sain't, with the mark between the n and the t. I chose it that way and I wouldn't change it, but I promise you that little sign has given me more work than plenty of songs. Every time I release something, someone or something tries to correct it. A form strips it out. A search engine turns it into something else. One platform shows it properly and the next one doesn't. So I'll start there, because it sums up pretty well what releasing music on your own means: half the work is keeping an eye on details nobody notices until they go wrong.

I have my own label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, and from there I've put out 273 singles in about two years. They're on Spotify, Deezer and YouTube. There's no big record company behind it coordinating things, no team checking the metadata. I check it. What follows isn't a manual. It's the things I wish I'd known before my first upload.

Your name has to be the same everywhere

It sounds trivial and it's the most important thing. If one day you write your artist name one way and another day another way, the platforms may decide you're two different artists. Then your songs get split across two profiles, or worse, end up on the profile of some stranger with a similar name. Fixing it afterwards is slow and tedious.

I have a rule: I always copy and paste the name from the same place. I never type it from memory. The apostrophe is a gamble every time, because there are several kinds of quotation mark that look identical to the eye and aren't to a machine. That happened to me at the start more often than I'd like to admit.

The same goes for the label name. MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, in capitals. Always the same. Consistency here has nothing to do with looks. It's pure admin, and admin is what makes people able to find you.

Titles break too

My titles don't help. They have accents, commas, sometimes they're long. «Mitad Venezuela, mitad Pakistán» (Half Venezuela, half Pakistan) has a comma in the middle and two accented words. «No quiero otro novio cojín» (I don't want another cushion boyfriend) has five words and not one is surplus. When I upload a song, I check the title is written exactly as it is on my website, on the cover and in the video. An accent missing in one place and not another seems like nothing, but then one platform's search can't find what another's can.

I have a very simple checklist. I won't copy it out in full because it's deathly dull, but it includes things like checking capitals, checking the cover matches the title and checking the song's language is marked as Spanish. It takes me a few minutes. Those minutes save me hours of emails later.

Another thing I learnt the hard way: between uploading a song and its appearing everywhere, time passes, and not always the same amount. One platform shows it sooner, another later. If you announce a song on social media the same day you upload it, chances are people will search and find nothing. Bad start.

So now I separate two moments. Uploading and telling. First I make sure the song is there, that it plays, that the details are right. Then I announce it. It seems obvious, but when you're excited about something new, the temptation to show it off right away is enormous. I've learnt to wait. Sometimes.

Spotify, Deezer and YouTube don't behave the same way. On some the cover appears large, on others it's a tiny square. On YouTube the video rules, and that's where the more than 280 music videos I've directed come in. Elsewhere, the audio rules. I don't try to adapt the song to each place, because the song is what it is. What I do is bear in mind that the cover has to work at postage-stamp size and the title has to be readable on a phone.

What I haven't managed, and here I'll admit a contradiction, is total control. Some things each platform decides for itself: which of your songs it shows first, which photo it uses, which other artists it recommends alongside you. I can take care of what I upload, but someone else dresses the shop window. That frustrated me for a while. Now I accept it as the price of being everywhere.

The website as the master copy

Because of that lack of control, I decided the place where everything is spelt right, without exception, had to be mine. In October 2026 I launched mikesaintlouis.com, and I use it as the reference. If I'm unsure how a title is written, I check the website. If a platform shows something odd, I compare it with the website. Every song has its page there with the Spotify link, so the website and the platforms point to each other.

Keeping it up to date is part of the job of releasing. For me, a song isn't fully released until it has its page.

What a record company would save me, and what it wouldn't

People sometimes ask whether it wouldn't be easier to have someone handle all this. Probably, yes. But I'd also have to explain to that person why the apostrophe goes where it goes, why the comma in «Mitad Venezuela, mitad Pakistán» can't come out and why I want to release so many songs. With 273 singles, I suspect that halfway through somebody would have asked me to slow down.

I'm not saying working without a record company is better for everyone. I'm saying that, for me, the practical side, tedious as it is, gives me something I value in return: I know exactly where every song is and why it's the way it is. If something goes wrong, I know where to look.

And if something goes right, I know that too.

Everything released, with the names spelt correctly, is at mikesaintlouis.com.