This most important piece here is that he's already broken even. Wow! I'd love to see the numbers comparing a Comedy Central production and Louis' self funded production. I bet there's countless areas of negligent spending in the CC production.
First, I think what Louis is doing is amazing and am a huge fan. Having said that however, how many other comedians can pull this off? He has a very large, very dedicated audience. Likewise for music. Trent Reznor can pull off very successful self-productions, but he's also Trent Reznor.
The question is, how can you make this model scale down to lesser-known acts?
The best way to scale this down to lesser-known acts is to reduce the barriers to entry for both the comic and the audience.
More specifically, if comics had a free service or tool that allowed them to set a price, upload some content, and have a promotional site like he had for his show it could work wonders. YouTube does this pretty well, but what he's done is much better (though there's a lot of benefit to having lots of videos in one place with good discoverability). Recording and editing is also getting cheaper every day.
To lower the barrier for the audience, shows for new acts would need to be even cheaper or free. Once they build a following they can start charging more.
The iTunes model is almost certainly the one to follow here: sell it cheap and go for volume. If the content is good and the barrier is low, people will eat it up and the artists will get their fair share and more. The middlemen in this equation are really the biggest problem right now (for so many reasons).
You're describing a solution I'm spending my life trying to make happen! I'd love your feedback on it: http://gumroad.com — I think this is a huge need.
I think I've seen Gumroad before (here on HN?) and thought it was an awesome idea. Just took a look at your other work and I've gotta say - thanks for building such great stuff!
> Having said that however, how many other comedians can pull this off?
Quite a few, really. The golden example I think is Jimmy Pardo's podcast, which has been turning a tidy profit for a while now. He was pretty niche-y and not nationally known, unlike Louis, but has still created a successful business on comedy, self-production and self-distribution.
You start by spending years on the club circuit, developing your material, honing your craft, and building an audience by releasing content that your fans can share. In the short term, you make money from performing. In the longer term, you reach a point where you can make money from selling recordings.
who would have been popular in a classic promotion environment
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Because the time and energy of the world's hackers is best spent on cargo cult business models attempting to mimic successes of yore?
How about developing tools to facilitate discovery of talented acts who will be popular in the current, real world environment where there's an internet, and people use it to find and distribute things?
To borrow a metaphor from Brian Eno, if recorded music (or any other duplicated and widely distributed art) is whale blubber, and we've reached the point of oil refinement, in what universe is the optimum response a sharper harpoon?
Sure, we can look at that, but then the experiences of people like Louis CK, Brian Eno, Trent Reznor, Radiohead, etc., are not particularly relevant, because they got famous in the old system, so aren't really examples of anything except, "if you got famous via old-style promotion, once you're famous, you can then sell direct online successfully". To reach a conclusion that you don't need the old-style promotion at all, we need more experiences of people who did not first get famous that way.
As is often the case, look to hip hop.. Odd Future, lil-b, Das Racist and (in the beginning) Soulja Boy are all examples of leveraging online presence into widespread popularity
That's not much of a useful consideration then; a more relevant question is how some non-negligible percentage of people can achieve at least moderate success, not how a handful of people can do something anomalous that gets famous (that'll always happen one way or another).
how some non-negligible percentage of people can achieve at least moderate success, not how a handful of people can do something anomalous that gets famous
The internet is unarguably a huge advantage for people on the lower end. There are some people who have been knocked form being successful in the traditional media to being successful on the internet only, but that internet group includes them and people who would have never been successful in the traditional media. I don't even think that's a question. The only reason someone who would have been successful in traditional media isn't successful on the Internet is that the increased ease of competition made it clear that they suck and they pushed them out.
I think it all comes down to marketing and advertising. In the end you may not make as much with an HBO/Comedy Central special, but would anyone know who Louis CK is without these?
It's more of a branding thing with the specials and getting your name out there. It may not payoff up front, but the deals that come after it (such as Louie, the TV show) make it well worth it in exchange for the money lost.
The trick isn't really building a platform for smaller indie people to do these sort of things, that's easy and already available widely. The trick is building a service where these smaller indie people can make it big without having to go through the big players like HBO/Comedy Central first. YouTube is on the right track and Pandora/Spotify seems to be doing this for music, they just need time to growth, because as big as YouTube is, it still doesn't have the weight and advertising ability that a channel like HBO/Comedy Central has. As the ability to sift through the junk becomes better and better via analysis of social cues/demographics, it will be easier for these sort of simple "I don't care if you pirate because it's cheap enough" models to take off for smaller people. But at that point YouTube or whoever fills that gap just becomes the next HBO/Comedy Central and the cycle repeats.
Bottom line is there's always going to be a "big wig" who owns almost all the eggs. For standup comedy it's Comedy Central and HBO. If you can make it there you're set. Maybe someday it will be the YouTube comedy channel, but someones going to always come out ahead and being the leader means you can set your own price on what you wish to pay (as HBO/Comedy Central has done here).
Nitpick: I agree with much of what you've said here, but as it pertains to Spotify, the majors have them by the balls, and the financial predicament that puts them in likely has some influence on their outrageously low payout rates which are steadily alienating musicians, independent and "signed" alike. (As an independent/amateur electronic musician, one of the qualities I look for in a distributor to get my music on iTunes, etc. is "does not submit songs to Spotify.")
I suspect that the type of solution you've described may work, but in its current incarnation, Spotify aint it.
In terms of distribution, SoundCloud and YouTube is very very close to being a good alternative to centrally-run companies of old. In terms of comedy, Derrick Comedy was actually really popular even before one of their stars got on Network television, simply from uploading videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/derrickcomedy.
Musically, one artist that's blown up solely from releasing their own material on the internet is The Weeknd ( http://www.the-weeknd.com/) , who makes and posts songs much more often than a band on a label does (his schedule seems to be one EP every six months or so).
This only scales so far. Once more books are priced at impulse levels, it will provide less of an advantage and ultimately hurt your bottom line compared to the current typical price level.
It's similar to web apps being "free" in order to attract eyes/users. I think competing on other fronts (quality, connection with users/readers, obsession with consumer satisfaction) are preferable to cutting price because it's "too easy" to compete on price
Got any examples of this? I mean, lots of stuff (gum and "People" magazine at the grocery store, screwdriver bits and flashlights at the hardware store) is priced at impulse levels in lots of stores, lots of types of stores. Whose bottom line is that hurting? Dewalt's or Wrigley's or Maglite's? I don't really think so.
Wow! I'd love to see the numbers comparing a Comedy Central production and Louis' self funded production. I bet there's countless areas of negligent spending in the CC production.
People said the same when Radiohead self-released their album. But the problem is that both Radiohead and Louis CK have benefited from EMI and Comedy Central boosting their profile for years.
A new artist can't release their own work and achieve these levels of success.
>A new artist can't release their own work and achieve these levels of success.
No, but they've never been able to. They've always had to grind it out making no money in open mic nights, or starting for another artist "for the exposure". Between Youtube and the ease of self-distribution, it is now possible for artists to bypass the studio distribution deals that take such a large cut and result in higher prices for consumers and fans.
Actually he said, "...And I've got the money back already. I broke even — and then some."
So not only did he break even, he has earned some additional money. And his initial statement ""I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special," says that doing comedy specials the 'regular' way earned him nothing.
Now I expect it is a bit more nuanced than that, in that he was no doubt paid an appearance fee for being in a comedy special, and he didn't put up the money to produce those specials So his "net" was the fee and opportunity cost of the time he didn't spend producing the special.
Contrast that with the one he put up on the web, he paid all the costs (although I assume the 'audience' in the special also paid to attend). The and it took some time no doubt to do the post production work and to put it up for streaming, etc. Which went up on the 10th of December and here 3 days later has broken even "plus a bit more."
Over the course of the year, more people will watch it, and while the volume goes down, the tail stretches out for literally years. He's got this material that has paid for itself and he can license it to Netflix for their streaming service, picking up a bit of change when people watch it there. He can put it up on iTunes or Amazon's video service and pick up some cash when it rolls there. And the killer?
Is he makes another 'special', and now that folks are coming to the web page he puts up for the first one, he can list them both.
Eventually (sooner rather than later) he's got a catalog of comedy bits, several distribution channels and a stready revenue stream and there isn't a 'media company' (like a Viacom or Sony) anywhere in sight.
Now someone else says "Hey man, that rocks how can I do that?" and they convert over. And two, maybe five, years from now "suddenly" everyone seems to be their own production/distribution company and a new ecosystem sprouts that helps those companies get their content to market and Netflix/Amazon/Apple are cutting deals with them directly and you and I win because we get better quality stuff and not so much of the hassles and the media companies lose.
Sketched out well. I listen a lot of podcasts by comedians and they all think what Louis CK is doing is great. I'd imagine that some that aren't quite as popular as him think they can't do it too, but once they see that it isn't insurmountable it will happen more. Comics are really protective of their material and want control of it: a few months back there was a big controversy over Stitcher.com grabbing RSS feeds and putting ads on them (http://www.nerdist.com/2011/09/the-stitcher-situation/).
Not to mention he has total control over the look and presentation of the material (editing, lighting, no commercials) because it's his money.
The content provider used to pay for the special, but now comedians are paying that cost up front and then selling the rights to air it. The next step is that the comedians just distribute their material themselves. (I'm sure there's a start-up opportunity there!)
This is inevitable because comedians are realizing that podcasts, not mass media TV or radio, are the best way to reach their audience for live shows, merch and record content income. In my opinion it's also because comedians can foster engagement with their fans on a deeper level than musicians because they are talking right to them.
