Comedy is Changing Entrepreneurship
Last month, I bought Louis C. K.’s comedy special when it went on sale for $5 (!!!!) exclusively on his website. For the same price that I can rent a movie on iTunes, which I’ve only been conned into doing once, I bought my favorite comedian’s comedy special. The download has “no DRM, no regional restrictions, no crap.” And it’s a pretty hilarious comedy special, melding the brilliance of Chewed Up with a whole lot of Louie. The best example of his George-Carlin-cum-everyday-man style has got to be his bit about leaving a rental car at the airport curb. I died. Best of all, as he explains here, it was so wildly successful that he was able to give a good chunk of it away to charity. Because he made ONE MILLION DOLLARS IN TWELVE DAYS and set the Twitter-verse on fire. If that’s not a game-changer for how TV specials are produced, distributed and marketed, then I don’t know what is.
It reminded me a lot of how Conan O’Brien’s used Twitter in his post-the Tonight Show days to promote his new stand-up tour. In this Google/YouTube Conversation with Conan, he talks how it blossomed into a new way of speaking to his fans. Watch it yourself (it’s pretty similar to the Can’t Stop documentary he did except he answers questions about hairballs in his college dorm) but there’s a pretty brilliant part when in both when he more or less says, “I wrote one tweet and sold out a national tour in minutes.” No publicist/manager/Ticketmaster-LiveNation. Just one tweet saying when and where to buy tickets for his tour. Game. Changer. And it spiraled into such a whole new way of thinking that when he started his new show on TBS, it was on on his terms on teamcoco.com where he could control the content. It’s one of the only shows I can think of that has its own stand alone site that is separate from the network it’s on. If you want Conan, you go straight to Team Coco.
There’s something going on in the entertainment industry around how technology is used and viewed. Rex Sorgatz wrote a great article this week called “LA is the Future. Kill Me Now” arguing this same point, going even further to suggest that LA is where the next tech entrepreneurial start-up boom is going to happen. He makes parallels to the NYC start-up craze (Kickstarter, FourSquare, Etsy):
In the recession that began in 2008, three sectors of the New York economy were hit especially hard: finance, media, and retail. It’s no coincidence that today’s most successful NYC-based startups are unique reinventions of those industries…
[TV] is clearly broken. Really broken. Stupid broken. And we all know this has to end, somehow. And we all know it will end, somehow … When the collapse hits, capital will rush out of the traditional entertainment industry faster than you can say “Lehman Brothers.” And, as in New York, talented young people with industry awareness will be there to grab that capital and create new businesses. That’s when things will get interesting. Just as New York — against all odds — became the locus of traditional business being disrupted by technology, Los Angeles will erupt with creativity around the collision of technology and entertainment.
It only makes sense that comedians, already trained to say, “Yes and…?” are the first ones disrupting the model. It’s what they do: improvise, ask questions and point out the ways that social culture is changing. Comedians like Louis C. K. and Conan O’Brien are flexible and aware enough to know that they can operate independent of the machine. It’s no wonder why they both have been massively successful at it and have the dollar signs to prove it.
As an avid entertainment and tech dork, I’m looking forward to seeing what this new shift is going to be. I already gave up the TV years ago for online TV and I’m ready for an even better experience. I don’t know if LA wants to respond to people like me nor if they’re just scared shitless by the success of people like Louie and Conan but all it takes is a few pot-stirrers. Or a few tech nerds willing to hedge a bet that their start-up idea is going to be the next entertainment game changer.
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