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The part that I think gets overlooked when we have these "Well he only made it because he's already popular" arguments is the fact that Louis CK was once himself a brand new talent that wasn't going to get shelf space at Walmart. Same with Trent Reznor, and Radiohead, and everyone else who has embarked on a magical "What if we didn't sell our product for the exact same price/exact same way everyone else has been doing?" experiment. No one starts out at the top. Everything is evaluated on its own merits, and past performance does not indicate future success. Otherwise we'd all be using Zunes and Apple TVs, because Microsoft was already big, and Apple is popular. Popularity doesn't factor, in my opinion. We have to evaluate the business model by itself. Everyone in the entertainment industry -- from movies, to music, to video games, to books -- generates content, presses it to a disc or otherwise physically produces it, sticks it on a truck, ships it to shelves everywhere in America, and sells it for the exact same price. A sea of different cover arts and $20 price tags. And when they don't move they slash it down to $10 and unceremoniously stick you in an unorganized bargain bin to make room for the next $20 crop. That is what spurs these kind of experiments, ultimately. Just try something different. We've got different communication channels now, different distribution methods, different payment methods. I think we do real damage to ourselves if we dismiss them off hand and say, "Well, they were already popular, so of course it worked." We completely dismiss that their experiment and their new model actually did work in a very real way, it generated real money, because people already liked them? That's absurd. |