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Comment by tgrass | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday HN rallied a post on Louis C.K. to the front page - a post which celebrated his deference to the inevitable reproduction of his work, a post which celebrated Louis as a hero for his ignoring this reproduction, for nobly enduring it like the good little artist he is and merely asking for a donation for his work.

I now see why it is popular here on HN for artists to give away their work when we as 'entrepreneurs' would never dream of giving away ours: the artist is labor, and we want to minimize that cost.

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The majority of real hackers here on HN have almost certainly contributed to an open source project and many have released their own work as open source.

The startup ecosystem exists, in large part, because a huge number of hackers created and freely gave away things like GCC, *BSD, Linux, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Apache, Nginx, Ruby, Python, etc. Without free, open source, software large amounts of funding would be necessary just to acquire the tools needed to build software systems.

People admire Louis CK's position because it strikes a good balance between the need to make money and the desire to share.

I agree in part.

The distinction to me is one's work on open source is generally considered charity, pro bono, representing a fraction of one's total work.

Louis C.K. on the other hand, and digitally replicable artists generally, are not producing their work for free as a charitable gift to mankind, nor is this free work being produced within a small fraction of their total working time.

We here on HN, as producers and consumers, hope for the success of efforts like Spotify because it makes our lives better. Our own business plans become more likely to be realized, our own entertainment consumption becomes easier and fuller.

And yet efforts like Spotify require artists to accept that they must ask for voluntary donations.

Not quite. Louis CK wasn't asking for a donation, he said that it cost $5 to watch his special.

But the point was that he made it available for everyone at a small price. You didn't need HBO for $10/month (typically where a comedian of his calibre would air their new special) and Comcast at $60/month on top of that. You didn't even need to pay Netflix $12/month or whatever. You didn't even need a PayPal account. Just pay for what you get in a DRM-free format.

I don't think this was even a sacrifice on his part. Sure he could sell DVDs through Amazon but how much of that does he actually profit? His costs for this experiment were the actual production of the performance (he smartly paid for it himself so he owns it, comedians are doing this more often now) and whatever server costs he has. His advertising costs are $0 through Twitter, positive press and retweets he's getting for this.

It's a win for everyone and I think bands would be wise to do the same.

It's not about lowering the cost for labor, it's about getting rid of the artificial, unnecessary middlemen.

I believe he actually stated that after the traditional sales channel gets their cut he ends up with about $5. So he is selling it for the same profit he would of seen and just cutting out all the middle men as he did not believe they where actually adding any value.

That is quite an unfair summary of the discussion you're referring to.

Funkah is correct. My comments are a hyperbolic defense of my own very subjective opinion.

For anyone who would like to form an opinion of their own here is the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3338065

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