Laughly, The Spotify Of Comedy, Gives Users Louis C.K. And Other Comedians On Demand

David Scott delivers his stand-up routine. Courtesy: Laughly

David Scott may be the perfect person to combine the on-demand capabilities of Spotify with the neglected listening genre of stand-up comedy. He’s an experienced founder who, after he sold his marketing technology company, Marketfish, in 2013, started writing his own comedy and landing stand-up gigs. At one point, he was performing two to three nights a week. He did more than 150 shows in all.

As Scott learned more about the comedy world, he realized how relatively difficult it was to for people listen to comedy via the web, despite its overall popularity. Pandora and Spotify both have some comedy content, but it’s never been a big focus for either company. On SiriusXM satellite radio, as many as 7 of its top 20 stations are ones that feature stand-up comedy. But satellite radio is largely limited to cars, and listeners can’t listen to particular tracks or comedians on-demand.

Gone are the days when people bought LPs and CDs of comedians’ work. In the early 1980s, Scott says, one out of five albums purchased was a comedy album.

“I realized that the distribution and consumption of comedy has changed greatly,” Scott says.

Scott saw an opening, and started serious work on Laughly early this year. The service, available via mobile app, launches today, with more than 20,000 tracks from 400 comedians available to people on-demand. Most of the biggest comedians are represented, including Kevin Hart, Louis C.K., Jim Gaffigan, Sarah Silverman, and Amy Schumer.



The model works like those of its musical peers. There’s a free platform that’s supported by advertising, and an ad-free version available for $4 per month. The revenue gets split 50/50 between Laughly and the comedy license holders. If a person listens only to one Jim Gaffigan album that month, then the license holder of that Gaffigan material would take home the entire $2. Otherwise, the money is split according to what was listened to by the user.

Subscribe Now: Forbes Entrepreneurs &  Small Business Newsletters

All the trials and triumphs of building a business – delivered to your inbox.

Scott has funded the company himself up to this point, paying the bills for Laughly’s 11 employees, which include eight engineers and two people working full-time on licensing material.

Getting the rights to so many comedians so quickly hinged on landing perhaps the biggest holder of rights first—Comedy Central. Any comedian who has done a special with the cable station had that material licensed through the company. Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, whose executives saw potential in Laughly’s model. From there, other labels and comedians piled on.

Laughly also offers a conduit for comedians to self-publish their material as a way to make some money and to get their work noticed. Scott’s engineers are currently working on technology that transcribes every single joke on Laughly’s platform, so that the tracks can be catalogued by a matching algorithm. The idea is that, through machine learning, users in the future will be able to discover comedy through the app that’s similar to their current preferences.