Open Letter from OK Go

OK Go, who we all know from their famous treadmill video (currently at 52 million views), recently went through an interesting episode.  See much of the success of this first video came from people embedding it on facebook and various blogs (which is what I'm assuming you all do with my posts).  At the time of the first video, there was no problem...their label, Capitol, hadn't really worked out its YouTube policies and OK Go was free to just run with it.  For their next album, OK Go decided to stick with what worked, and produced a new video which stays true to the fun loving quirkyness that made them sensations in the first place.  However this time Capitol would not allow them to make the video embeddable.  By this point, Capitol, as with many labels, had begun to monetize the YouTube videos of their artists.  This means commercials.  See but advertisers don't necessarily love the idea of the videos they sponsor being embeddable, meaning the ads could be shown anywhere.  Which is understandable...considering someone like Disney wouldn't want their ads showing up on a site featuring smut or potty language.

 However this left OK Go in a precarious situation.  Their label's digital strategy did not mesh with their digital strategy.  At this point they posted their Open Letter from OK Go, which describes everything here in greater detail and closes like this...

So, for now, here's the bottom line: EMI won't let us let you embed our YouTube videos. It's a decision that bums us out. We've argued with them a lot about it, but we also understand why they're doing it. They’re aware that their rules make it harder for people to watch and share our videos, but, while our duty is to our music and our fans, theirs is to their shareholders, and they believe they’re doing the right thing.

Then, something unexpected happened.  OK Go and EMI reached a mutual agreement whereby OK Go would leave the label and form their own.  They then teamed up with Statefarm Insurance to produce a new video, which would then be embeddable, and which was a success (currently closing in on 16 million views).  You can read more about it here.

So what does this mean?  While OK Go's route has been far from traditional, it does highlight the advantages of holding on to your copyrights.  It OK Go had been under their own label the entire time, this never would have been an issue.  Of course without the label's help, they may not have ever gotten that far. 

So should labels be more flexible with their artists?  Should artists hold onto their copyrights?  Time will tell.  For now, check out the fully embeddable video below.