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."
Edit: It's this interview on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1245329...
"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."