Comments on: Why Louis CK and Amanda Palmer are the future of content

By: jonathanwthomas

jonathanwthomas — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:39:21 +0000

People like Amanda Hocking will always be the exception, not the rule.

And Amanda Palmer had another gun in her arsenal – she’s married to Neil Gaiman who is arguably more famous than her and leveraged his own platform and dedicated fan base to promote her Kickstarter campaign.

By: jonathanwthomas

jonathanwthomas — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:37:52 +0000

The problem with this theory is that these people were already famous (and had ‘big media’ money behind them at first). Good luck building such a fan base and dedicated community from scratch – it will take years.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 00:29:06 +0000

The same thing is happening with books now that more and more midlist authors are signing on to Amazon’s self-publishing service and making boatloads of money directly from their readers. The times are changing, and they’re changing a lot faster than the old guard can deal with.

By: ScoPI

ScoPI — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 19:04:11 +0000

It wasn’t tens of thousands of fans who paid $5 each for a DRM free video of his live show… it was hundreds of thousands, because he made over $1 million on it.

By: Derek

Derek — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 05:02:57 +0000

And those who don’t, may well employ people to do that for them. Amanda has a whole team that she heads. It’s not inconceivable for an artist to have a team headed by someone else. That’s what a label is. Rather than engaging with an Artist, people could engage with an Artists Manager.

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 19:43:32 +0000

That’s true, Alex — and having that no doubt makes things easier when you decide to go it alone. On the other hand, Amanda Palmer didn’t have a big following before she left her label, and Jonathan Coulton hasn’t had a traditional at all to my knowledge and makes half a million dollars a year. Amanda Hocking didn’t have a profile as a writer either before she made $2 million on self-published ebooks.

By: Alex Calic

Alex Calic — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 19:37:48 +0000

Key point here (which you made in the last paragraph) is that both CK and Palmer did have old media platforms which enabled them to create brands that they could leverage themselves online. YouTube is an obvious example but there will need to be additional broad-based (in terms of audience) platforms that allow new artists to be discovered/adopted so they too can follow this type of path.

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 18:47:37 +0000

That’s true, Edward — someone up above made essentially the same point. Not everyone is going to be able to, or want to, engage in that kind of direct contact with their fans. But those who do will benefit from it.

By: Edward Lazellari

Edward Lazellari — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 18:31:42 +0000

The problem with this is that some artists don’t have the type of personality or people skills to do this, even though they are great artists. Some of the best writers and musicians of the past were downright antisocial, or depressives. Didn’t mean they didn’t make good art.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:49:30 +0000

You’ve got the implications right. Removing the middle man is the future. Listen to Bill Simmons podcast where CK talks more about it. But the assertion that he “he was far from being a top-tier name” is incorrect. He’s a much bigger deal in comedy than you know and is in a unique position to have something like this work. This would not work as well for someone who is mid tier. If, for example, someone like Doug Stanhope tried it, it is unlikely that results would be the same. The reach that some comics have is very, very easy to underestimate (Jim Gaffigan for example) and you’ve done it with Louis CK big time.