[someinternetguy]

I think it all comes down to marketing and advertising. In the end you may not make as much with an HBO/Comedy Central special, but would anyone know who Louis CK is without these?

It's more of a branding thing with the specials and getting your name out there. It may not payoff up front, but the deals that come after it (such as Louie, the TV show) make it well worth it in exchange for the money lost.

The trick isn't really building a platform for smaller indie people to do these sort of things, that's easy and already available widely. The trick is building a service where these smaller indie people can make it big without having to go through the big players like HBO/Comedy Central first. YouTube is on the right track and Pandora/Spotify seems to be doing this for music, they just need time to growth, because as big as YouTube is, it still doesn't have the weight and advertising ability that a channel like HBO/Comedy Central has. As the ability to sift through the junk becomes better and better via analysis of social cues/demographics, it will be easier for these sort of simple "I don't care if you pirate because it's cheap enough" models to take off for smaller people. But at that point YouTube or whoever fills that gap just becomes the next HBO/Comedy Central and the cycle repeats.

Bottom line is there's always going to be a "big wig" who owns almost all the eggs. For standup comedy it's Comedy Central and HBO. If you can make it there you're set. Maybe someday it will be the YouTube comedy channel, but someones going to always come out ahead and being the leader means you can set your own price on what you wish to pay (as HBO/Comedy Central has done here).

[Ryanmf]

Nitpick: I agree with much of what you've said here, but as it pertains to Spotify, the majors have them by the balls, and the financial predicament that puts them in likely has some influence on their outrageously low payout rates which are steadily alienating musicians, independent and "signed" alike. (As an independent/amateur electronic musician, one of the qualities I look for in a distributor to get my music on iTunes, etc. is "does not submit songs to Spotify.")

I suspect that the type of solution you've described may work, but in its current incarnation, Spotify aint it.