Here’s a very relevant related article…

When you have enough for an album. Release high quality versions of the songs. Your die hard fans would appreciate a sonically pleasing song.

Free giveaways is a marketing technique but ultimately you have to sell something.

Like the free carpet cleaning – but in the end you would have to pay to have addition rooms cleaned. At least you would see that you will be getting an excellent job done.

But I use to buy downloads from the real player store before I knew about about file sharing – they have 30 second samples of music – usually that was enough for me to make a purchase.

Getting the whole song is like getting the milk so why buy the cow?

Then you are also trusting that most of the people downloading will say “hey I’ve downloaded enough of this bands music for free its time I buy the album.”

Analogy: If a new restaurant gave out all of their food away for free day after day – why would a customer come in and say let me pay for this?

Of course the name of the restaurant will be buzzing – Free food but one day they will have to make money even to continue to give away free food.

If an artist spends money and records in a studio,pays session musicians,mixes the song, and masters it – this can be
expensive on a per song basis.

On the other hand if the artist does all the work on their own then production cost is less and giving away all their music makes sense.