D.I.Y.

Louis CK Goes Direct To Fan, Nets $200,000 In 3 Days – A Look Inside

image from www.google.comLouis CK is about as hot as a comedian can get right now. Taking a page from the direct to fan playbook that's been used by many indie musicians since Nine Inch Nails proved its potential, he decided to eliminate all middle men, record a love concert and sell it from his own web site for $5. The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. Three days laters he'd netted $200,000.  Here's a look inside the project:

"This was a premium video production, shot with six cameras over two performances at the Beacon Theater, which is a high-priced elite Manhattan venue. I directed this video myself and the production of the video cost around $170,000. (This was largely paid for by the tickets bought by the audiences at both shows)…

"The development of the website, which needed to be a very robust, reliable and carefully constructed website, was around $32,000…"

"The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website"

"As of Today (12/13), we've sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58)."

""This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video."

"I also got an education... I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood."

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Bruce Houghton on 12/14/2011 in D.I.Y. | Permalink | Comments (16)
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16 Comments

  1. I think it’s the only way to go! Otherwise, you end up having to listen to Corporate Lackeys who tell you what you can & can’t do. Sometimes that eliminates the best parts of the show.

  3. That’s really cool..He’s not an overnight success story but I like his approach..The fans win and he wins. He’s leveraged his fame on the mainstream and used it to promote his own product..Bravo

  5. The bulk of that 32k expensive for a “website” I guarantee you was for reliable bandwidth. Assuming the concert is 100mb. That’s 10500 GB that is enormous amount of bandwidth. We pay $439 dollars for 10GB of bandwidth per month at the company I work for.

  7. I love these success stories of the successful! Don’t get me wrong, I like C. K. and I wish him the best, but who is this story for? Amost all DIY artists CANNOT aford the money that went into making this project and neither do they have the fame and recognition to make it work either. So basically you’re telling your audience that they need to sign with a major, become successful first and THEN they can leave and act as independent as they’d like. I’m just sick of these stories that Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, etc, etc are going the direct route, leaving their labels behind to find success when they were ALREADY successful which is why leaving worked to begin with. This is NOT a strong enough formula for DIY artists to be led to believe will work for them.
    Free album download at http://www.facebook.com/chancius

  9. Chancius – Agreed that people mistakenly push these stories on us unknown DIY artists like we could achieve the same results, but Bruce and co. aren’t telling us that here. it’s just a cool story.
    I personally believe that yes, one great way to get your music our there and make money is starting on a major. get them behind you for a couple albums and then leave them if you want to.

  10. Chris, you’re right. What I liked most about this onew was that he knew that he could make more more money elsewhere, but chose this route as the right balance of making his fans happy and still making money.

  11. Just so you’re aware, Joe…$400/month for 10gb is a lot of money. Admittedly, I don’t know much about servers, but I’ve been thru a ton of them. I’m not trying to downplay your comment or anything…only that there are better options out there.

  13. Most of that money definitely went to get massive bandwidth. The HD version has 1.2 GB, the SD version over 300 MB, plus you can also stream it. Multiply that by the 110,000 downloads in less than a week and you’re already at over 177 TB of bandwidth! That’s on the level of YouTube I’d say. He probably has to rent an entire server farm for that bandwidth.

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