OK Go Gets Frustrated

So I have been spending day in and day out in the library working on my thesis and a friend sent me a very topical opinion piece by Damian Kulash of the band OK Go. You see, I'm writing about online piracy and how piracy is moving from individual crimes to a movement of pirates protesting the record industry. A major effect of piracy is that the record companies can't control music like they used to and make ridiculous profits. Thus, they are looking for different ways to make profits, namely by controlling everything bands do.

OK Go, who made themselves crazy famous by coordinating some sick treadmill and dance workouts, are now a little pissed at EMI. Apparently EMI won't let their newest video for the song, This Too Shall Pass, off of the album "Of The Blue Colour of the Sky" be embedded on blogs like this. Why, you ask? Cause EMI isn't making any money off of it. So, we will post the video until EMI asks us nicely, with some sugar on top, to take it down.

Here's the video:

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

And here's what Damian has to say:

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.

Let's take a wider view for a second. What we're really talking about here is the shift in the way we think about music. We're stuck between two worlds: the world of ten years ago, where music was privately owned in discreet little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible. The thing is, only one of these worlds has a (somewhat) stable system in place for funding music and all of its associated nuts-and-bolts logistics, and, even if it were possible, none of us would willingly return to that world. Aside from the smug assholes who ran labels, who'd want a system where a handful of corporate overlords shove crap down our throats? All the same, if music is going to be more than a hobby, someone, literally, has to pay the piper. So we've got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It's like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.