OK Go’s This Too Shall Pass Video

In this Open Letter “To the people of the world,” the band OK Go laments the state of labels controlling the embedding of videos.  The band has been on the cutting edge of independently making their own videos, with often amazing Internet response.  ”Here It Goes Again” (You know, the treadmill video) is consistently one of the most watched videos on YouTube, however all YouTube OK Go videos are coded with embedding disabled, as per their label.  Here, they perform their song “This Too Shall Pass” live on location, with a little help from the Notre Dame Marching Band.

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

So what’s there to do? On the macro level, well, who the hell knows? There are a lot of interesting ideas out there, but this is not the place to get into them. As for our specific roadblock with the video embedding, the obvious solution is for YouTube to work out its software so it allow labels to monetize their videos, wherever on the Internet or the globe they’re being accessed.

In the meantime, the only thing OK Go can do is to upload our videos to sites that allow for embedding…We do that already, but it stings a little. Not only does it cannibalize our own numbers (it tends to do our business more good to get 40 million hits on one site than 1 million hits on 40 sites), but, as you can imagine, we feel a lot of allegiance to the fine people at YouTube. They’ve been good to us, and what they want is what we want: lots of people to see our videos. When push comes to shove, however, we like our fans more, which is why you can take the code at the bottom of this email and embed the “This Too Shall Pass” video all over the Internet.

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