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Digital media is a funny business. No really I mean it. Let me tell you just what the grand old doyens of British comedy have done to their material. For the uninitiated, Monty Python is the name of a group of 6 comedians widely acknowledged as the funniest group of comedians ever.

No amount of writing can do justice to their comedic brilliance so I won’t try. However, the interesting story behind their Youtube adventure is this. So brilliant were the Pythons’ comedy that die-hard fans were posting much of their best performances on Youtube for all the world to see. As the music industry has already learned, suing filesharers alienates your customer and hardly makes a dent in the overall number of so-called pirates out on the www. You simply can’t sue enough quickly enough to make a difference.

The solution to this problem is of course to do the Python-esque thing.

Of course, this does seem like a trend. Radiohead pioneered online digital distribution with their album “In Rainbows”. Rock band Nine Inch Nails also tried their hand at it with their new album “Ghosts”. Radiohead made more off online distribution than they did with traditional media for their previous album “Hail to the Thief” even though users could download “In Rainbows” for free. This success is duplicated, no, exceeded, by Monty Python. They increased their DVD sales on Amazon by 23,000 percent after they unveiled their Monty Python channel.

Despite the seemingly outrageous success of online distribution, enthusiasm for this form of distribution doesn’t seem to be taking hold. Trent Reznor, lead singer for Nine Inch Nails, even claims that Radiohead was ‘insincere‘ about web distribution taking over as the new form of media distribution. What is stopping digital distribution from turning the tables on traditional brick and mortar distributors? Whoever knows the answer to that could well be the next Mark Zuckerberg, Larry&Sergei et al.