(Above: YouTube OK Go This Too Shall Pass video clip, but up for who knows how long, before a take down notice is issued and a property of EMI tag is substituted?)
Time for a little light relief, and this Rube Golberg contraption featured in the latest OK Go video clip does the job.
After the rigours of brooding about the Australian US Free Trade Agreement, there's also a point to be made by embedding the link to YouTube:
Record label EMI’s decision to disable embedding on music videos under its control has been a point of frustration for the band, and lead singer Damian Kulash has been incredibly vocal about the frustrations he as an artist feels about the issue of embedding, both in an interview with us last January and a more recent New York Times editorial. But the way that the band has gotten around the embedding problem in this case may have something to do with the fact that the entire video production was underwritten by State Farm Insurance, which gets some semi-prominent on-screen branding. (OK Go's New This Too Shall Pass Video: Branded, Embeddable on YouTube, and Jaw-Dropping).
Well it wasn't an actual New York Times editorial, but rather an Op-Ed contribution by Damian Kulash Jr., but it's still nice to read him ravage EMI on the question of embedding:
The numbers are shocking: When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.
Clearly the embedding restriction is bad news for our band, but is it worth it for EMI? The terms of YouTube’s deals with record companies aren’t public, but news reports say that the labels receive $.004 to $.008 per stream, so the most EMI could have grossed for the streams in question is a little over $5,400.
Kulash also has some sensible things to say about major labels as risk aggregators, and their inability to recognise how they might use viral marketing to their advantage:
In these tight times, it’s no surprise that EMI is trying to wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos. But it needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn’t benefiting the company’s bottom line, or the music it’s there to support. The sooner record companies realize this, the better — though I fear it may already be too late.
Funnily enough, our Malaysian correspondent reports that in that country if you search YouTube for "okgo" and "this too shall pass" you get a message saying "This video contains content from EMI. It is no longer available in your country."
Damn you EMI, damn you to hell.
Roll on Senator Conroy's great big internet filter, for how else can the intertube pirates be disciplined and stopped?
Even if a band actually wants to communicate with its fans ...
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