OK Go Get

This has been big news lately, but I haven’t spoken about it because I’m not really a fan of OK Go’s music. I guess you could call me a fan of their videos which is why the story is interesting and why it now suddenly is worthy of a post.
You may remember a few years ago, the band OK Go did a neat little video where they walked on treadmills and the choreography was so awesome that everyone went “Awesome!” and showed everybody else.
I was one of them; I think I showed my wife the video and she went “That’s awesome!”
I couldn’t tell you what the name of the song was and don’t bother telling me either. It’s irrelevant to this post.
The point is that enough people went “Awesome!” because it was indeed awesome and they had the ability to share the video with everyone else. The video was seen by everyone on the planet, but only 200,000 of them went from “Awesome!” to actually whipping out their wallets to buy the album that the treadmill video song was on.
That’s saying something, but the way that anyone who was interested in OK Go should look at it is this way: If we make a cool video that enough people see and like, we can realistically sell about 250,000 copies of the record.
EMI records took notice of this and said “We can sell that 500,000 copies of that record because we’re the same label The Beatles are on.” And the band, naturally said “OK. Go do it.”
The trouble was that the label gave the band some money to make another video where people went “That’s awesome!” and they evidently delivered that. I say that with hesitation because I haven’t seen the video.
And that’s where the story gets convoluted.
You see, because EMI funded the video, they told the band “You can let everyone see it. They have to watch it where we want them too.” And you can pretty much guess that where they wanted you to see it at was a location that promoted sales for the band and other label projects.
The problem with that request is that a video is essentially an advertisement. If I’m making a video to draw attention to my product, I’d like as many people as possible to be able to see it. It translates into more sales potential for my album, right?
EMI didn’t see it that way. They took the idea of “We paid for it, so therefore, it’s ours and we can dictation where it should be seen.”
Fair enough, but that’s not the way OK Go got people to see their first video is it. And the sales gained from everyone who saw that first video was the reason why EMI even got interested in the band.
EMI’s prohibiting embedding of the band’s first video translated into a sales tally of 20,000 copies. Surely way below the label’s expectation, and way below the total of the debut album. The band urged the label to let the video go “viral” by allowing people to embed it on their websites, blogs, etc. but the label refused. Their approach was similar to the kid in the sandbox that got mad at the way you played with his Hot Wheels cars and then picked them all up and went home.
The band just announced that they’re leaving EMI and they’re taking their record with them. After all, they could sell 10 times the number of albums that EMI managed to on their own, so why deal with them?
What surprising is how EMI, which is supposedly manned by intelligent people, wasn’t able to see the cost benefit in having an awesome video viewed by as many people as possible. It’s the equivalent of Gillette developing an ad for the new ten blade razor but then telling you to go to the company’s website to view the ad.
Rather than admit defeat and take off the embedding restrictions, the label let the band off. I guess I don’t see the cost benefit in that, unless the label saw something within the band that indicated that they would have to fund a long term goal to get the band to a point of being able to actually make them money, and as we know now, record labels don’t like to wait for very long for a return on their investment.
Which brings me back to my first point of not being able to actually remember the song, words, or melody for that treadmill video. Are OK Go a band with very little potential for hit singles or are they the benefactor of having creative promotional videos to fuel interest for seemingly mediocre songs. Perhaps you could make the argument that EMI took note of that possibility, but in looking at the timeline events for their former-roster act OK Go, that’s probably not the case.
OK Go should be thankful that they were able to get up and leave.