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Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

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Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#91

Post by dman »

dmd wrote: post #50
pyre wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It prevents person-to-person sharing for non-technical users of the original content . The real question is: How hard is it for a non-technical user to find and download a pirated version from the Internet? It's the difference between: Hey! This track is awesome lemme email it to you. and Hey! This track is awesome. Google for a pirated version of it!

Most people I know outside of programming circles would find the latter to be WAY too much bother.

How much of the world lives in programming circles? Is it large enough for the labels to bother suing users? Regular joes/janes are more resourceful than you give them credit for.

Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#92

Post by tptacek »

antidaily wrote: post #87
nostromo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little Googling led me here ( http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/richest... ) which estimates he's worth about $6.5mm. Who knows if it's accurate. The "It's Always Sunny" guys as a comparison (also FX) do quite well, despite being obscure. As Louis does more seasons, I suspect he'll also become quite wealthy -- he's the only real 'talent' on the show that he stars in, writes, and directs -- which…

He hasn't had this kind of exposure ever. A lot of people didn't know who he was until about a year ago. So I can imagine things are really starting to pick up. If he was struggling, he's not now.

I saw him over a year ago and he packed the Chicago Theater.

I saw him in 2008 and he packed the Vic.

He had an hour-long HBO special in 2007.

Lucky Louie was 2006. That's a top-billed HBO show built around Louis CK.

He's only just now getting "Dane Cook Famous", sure, but he's been spectacularly successful on the scale of "performing artists" for awhile now.

Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#93

Post by rohwer »

On the WTF Podcast by Marc Maron, he explains how his terrible buying habits with an Amex black card, including a new Mercedes, a sojourn at the Ritz, and a brass instrument, led to his inability to get a credit card for many years.

He basically lost his way after comedy clubs closed in the late 80's and had to reinvent himself. Youtube his old "I have a peach" routine to understand his reinvention. Here is a version of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmZfVCSzEw0

Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#94

Post by JonnieCache »

tptacek wrote: post #89
JonnieCache wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Booking the venue * Paying the venue staff * Producing marketing materials * Doing the actual marketing * Transport * Hotel * Transport for the support acts * Hotel for the support acts * Fee for the support acts * Fee for the support acts' agents * Insurance * Agency fees It adds up. Obviously I don't know anything about his finances, maybe he is actually stinking rich, all I'm saying is tours like that aren't nec…

His overhead could be 70% and he'd still be taking home huge amounts of money for every tour. He's selling out shows and has been for at least ~4 years now. If the tours weren't lucrative, he'd raise the face price of tickets. Sorry, I just don't buy the idea that Louis CK is anything but "pretty wealthy" at this point in his career. Which is great, because he's one of my favorite performers anywhere.

Yep, you're almost certainly right. I'd bet on it being more than 70% though.

Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#95

Post by drumdance »

tptacek wrote: post #77
malvim wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where you're coming from, but we sometimes seem to forget that pretty much everything these guys say on stage is made-up material. Of course, some might be based on fact, but let's not assume whatever he says happened to him did happen to him, or even happen at all! Did you watch that interview about his "everything is amazing and nobody's happy" bit? He said that the bitchy guy "sitting next to him" in…

This whole subthread is based on "things Louis CK said". Regardless: it's doubtful, given how well his tours seem to do, than Louis CK is anything less than "pretty wealthy".

It's all relative, just like in the tech startup world. We all envy him. Meanwhile he envies Jerry Seinfeld.

(I use "envy" as hyperbole.)

Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#96

Post by _delirium »

cbs wrote: post #28
yan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notch was also an anomaly. I agree that it's a beautiful story, but rules aren't defined by their exceptions.

Success is an anomaly.

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).

Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#97

Post by ddw »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #74
aspir wrote: post #3

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.

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…

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/).

Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#98

Post by _delirium »

joejohnson wrote: post #61
gospelwut wrote: post #53

Wow, everything about HN really is the opposite of Reddit.

I know. HN is so cool. And people here never point that out, unlike that lame circle-jerk Reddit.

I assumed it was sarcastic, since posting about Louis CK all the time for the past 5 years is sort of Reddit's thing.

Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#99

Post by _delirium »

Ryanmf wrote: post #33
yan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this argument too, so it's a good thing no one in this thread is making it. The conversation here is about discovering talented acts who would have been popular in a classic promotion environment but need the initial audience.

who would have been popular in a classic promotion environment wat 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 meta…

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.

Re: Louis C.K. "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special"

#100

Post by danso »

kbutler wrote: post #73
danso wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be correct that DRM makes it "no harder to pirate that same content"...but it DOES make it harder for people to transfer files to each other through email/CDs/USB keys. To you, it may seem trivial to load up a torrent program and spend some of the day browsing the trackers, but this is not at all trivial to the average person. Think about it...DRM can be circumvented on iTunes music by burning it to a CD, giv…

> Yet iTunes has been a huge success because people either do not realize this or because the few extra steps is not worth the effort. Please be careful attributing the success of iTunes to DRM. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay : - Steve Jobs said that Apple didn't want to use DRM but was forced to by the music labels, who wouldn't provide the music w/o DRM. - Apple announced in Jan 2009 iTunes was…

Ah, you are correct. It is more correct to say that iTunes was a success despite DRM.

However, I did not mean to assert that DRM was iTunes's key to success, even if Jobs's actually wanted DRM. I'm only saying that significantly fewer people would pay 99 cents a song if sharing music was as easy as buying it off of a centralized source and sending it around by email.

DRM is a pain in the ass for all the honest people. But its role in making sharing less-than-frictionless for the average user probably pushed a good number of people to just sign up for an iTunes account to pay the measly $.99

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