I’m really happy for you Louis, I’ma Let you finish, but…
I’ve been following Louis CK’s DIY $5 Digital Download comedy video release over the last couple of days with great interest. With Louis releasing the figures for sales, it’s clear that he’s made back a huge figure on his investment. While this was a great experiment at flying in the face of distribution labels unfortunately there’s one reason this model wont work for you or the next human…
Quite simply, Louis has 800,000 twitter followers.
That’s it. Louis has such online clout that he’s able to leverage this model and prove it is a success. That the promotion has gone viral has only succeeded in inflating figures and providing an unrealistic datapoint. I’m sure if gaga was to do a similar stint you’d have people buying and downloading the music who have never before downloaded music in their life, and I can guarantee you she’d make a boatload more than she does under her current label contract. It’s great that Louis can vault the labels and show that drm-free distribution is great (which it undeniably is), however self distribution is no magic bullet for your everyday creative.
Chris Coyier sums it up best when he says:
Why Louis C.K.’s sales experiment worked: he put in craploads of years honing his craft and building a fan base.
