There’s been a lot of talk about Louis CK directly marketing his recent concert online and how he made a million bucks at it in little over a week, and I think it’s well deserved. I paid 5 bucks for a video that at times is fantastically funny and other times (much fewer and further between) is just “pretty funny” and I have zero regrets whatsoever for the purchase. And I get to keep it forever – no rental approach here.
It’s funny, though: if I’d paid ten bucks perhaps I’d be a little ticked, I don’t know. What I do know is when Radiohead let their customers choose the price I bought In Rainbows off their site, and then I turned around and bought it the full definition bits from Amazon in CD form when they were released. In other words, Radiohead got paid twice by guys like me for being incredibly flexible in their approach to selling and distributing their works.
And I think that’s the point to take away from all this. I hope more performers remove the middleman and simply sell their performances at a price that empowers their audience to be truly empowered and connected. Fifteen or twenty bucks from Best Buy isn’t that solution, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say Apple’s fairly high and inflexible pricing might not be the complete long term solution either. For most of us competitiveness and elasticity drive secondary purchases like these, and frankly we’re the “gravy” that makes the entertainment market lucrative.