Yesterday, Pharrell Williams released an album. He also turned 51.

It’s on a WordPress website. It’s not available through streaming platforms. If you want, you can download all of the songs in .mp3 format with one click. It’s delightfully straightforward. 

He also didn’t promote it, not even on his own social media channels. Not that he had to—his fans found it and alerted the rest of the internet.

If he had sat on it longer, ran it through the promotion machine, maybe timed it with the next Louis Vuitton show (where he holds the title creative director of menswear), set up a press run, it would be set up to make a much greater impact commercially. Or at least put it up on Spotify—where algorithms would send his 34+ million fans a notification.

Nope. He and his team just put it out there.

It’s a nice reminder that if you want to, you can really just do something. You can make something and give it to the people you made it for.