The major labels are well known for making increasingly ridiculous inititatives in order to ‘safeguard’ their own material, but this latest attempt to stop Ok Go’s latest viral video “less viral”, is just absurd.
You must have heard of Ok Go. The hipster-cum-rockers who released their treadmilling ‘Here It Goes Again’ of seventeen takes to critical acclaim and almost 50,000,000 YouTube views on their official account alone, have engineered another highly sophisticated, impossibly co-ordinated feel-good video that they want the world to see. Their record label disagrees.
Embedding is disabled for the video, which prevents me from posting it here, or anywhere else on the internet, besides YouTube. EMI supposednly want to do this to prevent any loss of profit from the lack of advertising outside of the YouTube page, but really… won’t sales increase from people seeing it around the web anyway? And Ok Go’s current success stems almost entirely from that first video, so why should EMI let them die again with pointless restraint when ‘This Too Shall Pass’ could rebirth them from the ashes.
“ I suppose that’s a major theme of this decade that has just been: the failure of companies to give the consumers what they want, which in turn has resulted in a culture where illegality, piracy and hacking is the norm. ”