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ok go and non-embeddable youtube videos

January 20th, 2010 • posts i've written

Last night, the band OK Go published an open letter to their fans. It’s a fantastic read from a band that’s been navigating the industry waters for many years in very savvy ways and have found themselves unfortunately between what their fans want and what the label demands. Here’s an excerpt:

This week we released a new album, and it’s our best yet. We also released a new video – the second for this record – for a song called This Too Shall Pass, and you can watch it here. We hope you’ll like it and comment on it and pass the link along to your friends and do that wonderful thing that that you do when you’re fond of something, share it. We want you to stick it on your web page, post it on your wall, and embed it everywhere you can think of.

Unfortunately, as of now you can’t embed diddlycrap. And depending on where you are in the world, you might not even be able to watch it.

We’ve been flooded with complaints recently because our YouTube videos can’t be embedded on websites, and in certain countries can’t be seen at all. And we want you to know: we hear you, and we’re sorry. We wish there was something we could do. Believe us, we want you to pass our videos around more than you do, but, crazy as it may seem, it’s now far harder for bands to make videos accessible online than it was four years ago.

What’s so crazy about this particular letter, and the band’s vantage point, is that OK Go’s popular success today is owed to a YouTube video that ricocheted across the web in 2006 to become one of the most popular videos ever on the platform (today it sits at just over forty-nine million views). The video’s dramatic success guaranteed the band a deal with EMI and cult status on the web (in all fairness, their first popular YouTube video was for the song “A Million Ways” in 2005 that cemented the band’s interest in web video).

Cut to today and the band’s promotional efforts for their third album. Again, from the band’s open letter:

Fifteen years ago, when the terms of contracts like ours were dreamt up, a major label could record two cats fighting in a bag and three months later they’d have a hit. No more. People of the world, there has been a revolution. You no longer give a shit what major labels want you to listen to (good job, world!), and you no longer spend money actually buying the music you listen to (perhaps not so good job, world). So the money that used to flow through the music business has slowed to a trickle, and every label, large or small, is scrambling to catch every last drop. You can’t blame them; they need new shoes, just like everybody else. And musicians need them to survive so we can use them as banks. Even bands like us who do most of our own promotion still need them to write checks every once in a while.

Oh those poor record labels… perhaps when they were putting cats on the radio they should have paid more attention to the behaviors behind massive internet adoption and usage, instead of suing teens and grandparents for file-sharing? I have to believe the band is bowing and kneeling in the language of this letter for the very checks they mention here.

But wait, there’s more:

As you’ve no doubt noticed, sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Blahzayblahblah.cn run ads on copyrighted content. Back when Young MC’s second album (the one that didn’t have Bust A Move on it) could go Gold without a second thought, labels would’ve considered these sites primarily promotional partners like they did with MTV, but times have changed. The labels are hurting and they need every penny they can find, so they’ve demanded a piece of the action. They got all huffy a couple years ago and threatened all sorts of legal terror and eventually all four majors struck deals with YouTube which pay them tiny, tiny sums of money every time one of their videos gets played. Seems like a fair enough solution, right? YouTube gets to keep the content, and the labels get some income.

The catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn’t pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn’t get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won’t let us be on your blog. And, voilá: four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards.

The fans get less of what they want (to be able to use the band’s music to construct their own identity among their peers); the band gets less of what they want (happy fans and more popular vids); so the record labels can earn digital pennies instead of the analog dollars of yore? Are we sure this is a rational transaction?

The labels clearly can’t rationalize the value of a video embedded to a blog if it doesn’t earn them micro-payments – and this is, really, continued short-term and short-sided thinking on their part (cue the species ending asteroid for the love of god, please).

The band goes on to say that because the label won’t allow for their YouTube videos to be embeddable, the band instead puts them on Vimeo, Myspace, and anywhere else for the fans to grab and embed – which spreads their views across several platforms, diluting that one single giant view count to parade around the internet – the public stats as first impression game is therefore lost.

And I really loved this next bit of the letter,

With or without this embedding problem, we’ll never get 50 zillion views on a YouTube video again. That moment – the dawn of internet video – is gone. The internet isn’t as anarchic as it was then. Now there are Madison Avenue firms that specialize in “viral marketing” and the success of our videos is now taught in business school. But here’s a secret: zillions of hits was never the point. We’re a rock band, and it’s a great gig. Not just because we get to snort drugs off the Queen of England (we do), but because the only thing we are expected to do is make cool stuff. We chase our craziest ideas for a living, and if sharing those ideas takes 40 websites instead of one, it doesn’t make too big a difference to us.

Even though EMI might be able to control the embed function on their videos, they can’t stop the direct communication from the band to the fans that the web offers. With open letters like this and pleas from fans stacking up, how long can labels ignore obvious facts?

And what opportunities are they flushing down the toilet this time? (like, helloooo, where’s my spotify?)

Oh and wait, if OK Go can attract the kind of attention that labels no longer have a chance at offering, why does the band really need the label? Surely not every band can be Radiohead, but I’m surprised OK Go isn’t willing to risk it.

While you ponder this, give the band’s new single a watch and listen, courtesy of Vimeo: