Louis C.K. releases new $5 DRM-free comedy recordings: Carnegie Hall (2010) and Shameless (previously on HBO)

I just got a mass-email from Louis C.K., apparently sent to everyone who bought his $5 Beacon Theater show. He’s offering audio-recordings of two previous shows with the popular $5-no-damn-DRM price. The email itself is hilarious as well.

Here is what it says for those who aren’t on the mailing list:
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Hello there. I am Louis C.K. for now. You are a person who opted into my email list, when you bought my Live at the Beacon standup special. As I promised, I have left you alone for a long time. Well, those days are over. I am writing now to let you know that I am offering some more stuff on my site, which you are more than welcome to buy. What does “More than welcome” mean? Well, it means you can totally buy this stuff. Like, totally.

Okay so there are two new products. They are both audio comedy specials. One is called…
Louis CK: WORD – Live at Carnegie Hall

This is about an hour long and it’s a recording of a live standup show that I did at Carnegie Hall in November of 2010 as part of a national tour I was on entitled “WORD” I’ve had a lot of requests from people to release that show as a speical or as a CD. I hadn’t done so because a lot of the material that I did on the WORD tour, was in the second season of my show “LOUIE” on FX. But I decided since it’s never been released as an entire show, and some of the material was not on my show, I’m releasing this now. I’m giving you this long and boring explaination because, as most of you know, I release about an hour or more of new standup material every year and folks can count on seeing a new show every year. This is old material, so I don’t want to be a dick and pretend it isn’t.

Anyway, Louis CK: WORD – Live at Carnegie hall is available for the same 5 dollars as everything will be on louisck.com. It is the same deal as before that you get 4 downloads and the file is drm free. YOu can burn it onto a CD, play it on your ipod, whatever you want. The special is broken up into separate tracks because I think that’s more fun for a comedy album, but they are all just one thing you buy all at one time.

The second new thing is even older, actually. It’s an audio release of “Shameless”, my very first hour long standup special that I did for HBO. It was never released as an audio CD, so I asked HBO to let me offer it on this site and they agreed. They also agreed to let me offer it, the same as the rest, DRM free, for 5 dollars. Obviously I’ll be sharing the Shameless money with HBO but I think it’s pretty cool that they’re letting this be out there unprotected like this. Shameless is also 5 dollars, drm free, and you can download it a bunch of times for the price.

Lastly, I’m offering Live at the Beacon Theater as an audio version, for those many of you who have asked for it. This is just exactly an audio version of the video special. Those of you who have already bought Live at the Beacon theater already own this. If you just return to the site louisck.com with your password, it is now live and available for you to download at no extra cost. Those of you who now buy LIve at the beacon theater for 5 dollars, will also have the audio version availbable to you. It’s simply been added to the video downloads and streams you already were getting.

Later, I am going to make a version of Live at the Beacon theater, that is a separate audio special, which will be much longer. That will cost money. Because I’m an asshole. But that’s later.

Also later, actually soon, I’ll be putting my first feature film “Tomorrow Night’ up for sale on the site. And also other things. Soon. For now. Please feel free to click on the button below, to purchase some of the new stuff, using Paypal or Amazon payments, we now accept both. Or go to louisck.com and peruse the new items. I think we have some samples there that you can check out.

You may have noticed that Louis CK LIve at the beacon theater is airing on the FX network. FX agreed to air it 10 times over the next few months. The version on FX is only 42 minutes long and we had to take out the fucks. The reason I chose to air the special on FX is that FX is my people. They gave me my show LOUIE (season 3 premieres on June 28th at 10:30pm) and they have never aired a standup special. So I thought it would be cool to let them air it and bring more people to the site who want to get the complete unexpurgated version. Also FX doesn’t make me cut things for content. Just the big words (fuck, etc)

Okay. that was exhausting. Sorry. I didn’t even ask you how you are. How are you? Oh yea? Oh good. That’s great. What? Oh man. That’s tough. I’m sorry… Oh well that sounds like you handled it well, though. So. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know that’s… yeah. Well… Just remember, time will go by and that’ll just be on the list of shit that happened to you. You’ll be okay. Yeah. Huh?… Oh. Really? HE DID? Oh my GOD! hahaha!! That’s CRAZY! No. no. I won’t tell him you told me. Of course not. Alright well… uhuh? Oh wow. yeah. Alright well.. I really gotta go. Thanks for listening. I’m glad you’re basically okay. Stay in touch.

your friend,

Louis C.K.

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The shows are available at his site, louisck.com. If you missed the email he sent out after his huge success with independently releasing his Beacon Theater show, here it is.

I'm a programmer journalist, currently teaching computational journalism at Stanford University. I'm trying to do my new blogging at blog.danwin.com.