In an interview I can't find right now the band explains that they came up with the idea of supplementing the income from the video with a corporate sponsorship. EMI helped them negotiate a sponsorship deal with State Farm (in return for a plug at the end of the video), so then EMI allowed the video to be embedded, since it was making extra money from the sponsorship.
"Mr. KULASH: Yeah, we made the Notre Dame version of the video about three months ago, and we put that one up. And following the label's sort of standard procedure at that time, it wasn't embeddable, and we just got a lot of response from our fans, people really upset that they couldn't put it on their sites, and they couldn't blog about it, and they couldn't sort of include it in their Internet. It had to be done the way EMI wanted them to.
So before we made our next video, we looked for corporate sponsorship, which would allow us to roll out the video the way we wanted to, and to be fair, EMI helped us find corporate sponsors, who turned out to be State Farm. And State Farm agreed to cover the cost of the video if we would thank them at the end of it, and they left the creativity entirely to us. And it was sort of it's kind of like, you know, 17th-century patronage of the arts. We got to do what we wanted to do, and we put a thank you on the end, and that's it."
As far as I can make out, their latest video was made after the split with EMI. They don't own the rights to the first big hit video they had (the one with the treadmills), so presumably that will never become embeddable.
It may be a dupe, but this article has some interesting statistics of how their album sales have increased since making the video embeddable. Anecdotal, sure, but interesting nonetheless.
The article linked to above is just a short blurb..
There are far too many factors at play to attribute the increased sales to such a small aspect as video embedability. However the label certainly appeared to be completely braindead in this regard. What harm could possibly come from allowing embeds?
Indeed, one reason behind the phenomenal success of the band is some of its early videos were viral sensations in the mid-2000s. Killing embedding seriously weakens the ability of OK Go to attract new followers, as their music doesn't get a lot of radio airplay and new fans who are unaware of the band are probably not browsing YouTube to find new music -- they're looking on friends' facebook pages, music blogs, etc.
I believe an OK Go member said that YouTube will only pay royalties for the song if it is watched on their site, and not embedded. The label would rather get the guaranteed $ from each viewing of the video than the potential $ from getting more exposure.
See, it's easy to call big old businessmen stupid, but there's more to these decisions than consumers can see. Not to say you shouldn't put on pressure for them to change, but respect what they decide in the end, and move on if it's not worth it to you.
Since when do you have to respect another company's business decisions? In the end, there is content we want, and the company is making it harder for us to get it. Nothing respectable from a consumers point of view about that.
I just mean you should respect how their decision affects themselves. Respect that they're looking out for themselves, they're more likely to know what's best for them than you are, and that their goals aren't necessarily in line with yours.
So yes, you should complain about them, but you shouldn't complain that they're being "stupid" (ie, not doing the best for themselves), you should worry about yourself and complain that you're not getting what you want, and you should put pressure on them. Let them figure out how and whether to give it to you.
To me, the alternative is people feeling like they should micromanage each other, which I think is bad for various reasons.
