Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

It really doesn't matter how many people pirated it, as long as he makes enough money for it to be worth it to him to have made it in the first place. If it was 10 people but 40,000 bought it or a million pirates and 40,000 consumers, it's all the same to him.

Using Louis C.K. as a guiding light for the rest of us is a little like hearing that indie game developers can make big bank, because Notch did. Louis C.K. is the biggest comedian now, and is generally popular with appearances on all the late-night talk shows, NPR, reddit, etc. We have no idea about what parameters had the biggest influence. Novelty value is probably one of those parameters as well.

We don't know how much Louis would have made, had he published the normal way, but we do know that the customers benefited by it.

We need more people to do this to draw any significant conclusions from it.

It is a great story that someone as popular as LCK chose to do this partly as a service to his fans, but I don't know how much there is to be learnt from the perspective of self-publishing right now.

I think your math here using different assumptions than he would.

"This was largely paid for by the tickets bought by the audiences at both shows."

Otherwise he would have been able to simply pocket 170,000 dollars worth of tickets, as if he had done a regular show.

So to him, that's a net loss of 170k, you don't get to add it back in at the beginning.

So, 550 - 170 - 30 = 350k

You've also got to assume that his time is worth something, he could probably be working on something else instead of arranging his own marketing blitz... Also have to assume he pays for his own travel expenses etc.

I can see that being an expensive proposition if he, for example, has to fly cross country, miss out on potential shows, etc. If he misses out on 2 shows, that's a couple hundred thousand right there (apparently).

The point being, if he had done this through a media conglomerate, he probably could have had time for other stuff that would have made him money.

Bandwidth costs money too. > 100,000 GB isn't particularly cheap.

"I only heard of Louis C.K. from watching one of his stand-up shows on TV on an airline, so even if he didn't get payed directly, there's still publicity value in them."

Same, except it was YouTube. There's even publicity value for him in piracy. If he can afford to sell this thing for $5 and make a profit, he only needs something like 1/15th of people to become fans, buy a ticket and see him live.

"In our haste to cast out the old guard, we tend to lose sight of the fact that the old guard still fills what appears to be a necessary purpose: the breaking-out of artists. I'm confident and hopeful that their crucial role in that purpose will, eventually, weaken or fade. But for now, it's still a strong reality."

To be totally but somewhat apologetically blunt - that is a steaming pile of BS. That is the exact party line repeated by every single rank and file music industry do-nothing to justify their phony-baloney jobs.

In my own personal experience, affiliation with a record label as a young and growing artist is almost certainly more likely to handicap your chances at success than it is to actually help it. The reason is that when the young artist buys into the party line that "you need the major label machinery to grow your career", the artist then hands over a large amount of control and trust to a supposed "experienced, connected industry professional" to do a job that 99 times out of 100 would be better off done by the artist themselves.

Not only that, but the young artist has no idea that the supposed "experienced, connected industry professional" has zero interest in or understanding of what it is that the artist actually has going for them, either artistically via their music or commercially via their fanbase. At that point all they know is that for some reason, things aren't working out as everybody had hoped it would with the new label. They find out later that they are essentially paying a 100% interest rate on their advance for the privilege of believing this in the first place.

I and all of my buddies in other bands live our lives in the long-tail environment and we play for larger crowds and make more money than probably 98% of the suckers that take the advice to place their bets on "the traditional industry model". And we own our souls outright. You've probably never heard of any of us, but we're okay with that.

THE ONLY WAY FORWARD is to once and for all crush the notion that the "traditional industry model" is anything other than a parasite that eats hopeful and talented artists and excretes auto-tuned plastic dolls.

Rant over for this round.

People feel invested in the purchase when someone like Louis CK comes out and speaks directly to his fans. We all get to know what the deal is, and how it works. It's the same feeling you get when you support a Kickstarter project, even if (to be cynical) many Kickstarter projects are just a way to sell units directly from producer to consumer.