OK Go – Antenna http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu Responses to Media and Culture Thu, 30 Mar 2017 23:48:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5 Adventures in Music Video http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2010/03/16/adventures-in-music-video/ http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2010/03/16/adventures-in-music-video/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:44:59 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=2514 5958-oh-no.jpg (300×300)

On the heels of the popularity of the Rube Goldberg video for “This Too Shall Pass,” OK Go announced that it was leaving an already beleaguered EMI to establish its own label Paracadute Recordings.  Quickly a story emerged treating OK Go as the musical David fighting the evil Goliath of EMI.  This story is largely true, as EMI’s ridiculous stance on video embedding evidenced a fundamental misunderstanding of web promotion and the social value created by allowing users to spread music videos in an age where the music video as a genre of cultural production is in desperate need of reinvention.

However, OK Go is no diminutive David, having already cut its teeth producing videos such as “Here It Goes Again” and managing its own publishing, merchandising, and touring rights.  On January 18, 2010, lead singer Damian Kulash posted an open letter to OK Go’s fans, explaining the band’s fight with EMI over embedding and geoblocking.  Additionally, OK Go circumvented EMI’s backwards social media policies and obtained sponsorship from State Farm for the second video for “This Too Shall Pass.”

And EMI is too weak to be a Goliath.  Embattled by recent disputes with Pink Floyd and Danger Mouse and facing a blitz of negative PR from the possible sale of Abbey Road Studios, EMI finds itself facing money problems and issues with its owner (the private equity firm Terra Firma).

Perhaps part of the problem is that the members of OK Go are better videomakers than music makers.  Peter Kafka writes, “If EMI’s executives allowed themselves to speak candidly, they would likely point out that while OK Go made great videos, it didn’t seem to make music that many people wanted to buy.  Soundscan says the band has sold all of 500,000 albums in the U.S., both in physical and digital form, in its three-album tenure at EMI. That’s 488,608, to be exact. Plus another 25,000 single tracks.  That’s not awful. But it’s not the kind of sales that would inspire a big label to spend big money promoting an act. Even when the industry’s business model was still intact.”  Rachel Bailey writes, “Chicago treadmill champions OK Go are better known for their playful, viral-friendly music video for ‘Here It Goes Again’ than for creating hit singles.”  Perhaps Bailey and Kafka’s statements show that visibility, critical acclaim, and monetary success (of course, success is relative and subject to definition) are not necessarily connected in the value chain and that these connections need to be re-imagined and constructed from scratch in the new music economy.

Many of us want to draw a separation between the recording industry and the music industry (for more on this, see the great blogs out of the Berklee School of Music by Eric Beall and Dave Kusek).  OK Go’s decision shows the decline of major label dominance.  But we must remember that the hegemony of the major labels was always hard fought, obtained through the cooptation of indie labels as incubators of talent and the influencing of national and global media policies ranging from the Federal Bribery Act of 1963 that outlawed payola to the negotiations surrounding free trade agreements.

The question of how value will be defined and the relationship of economic value to social, cultural, and participatory value remains.  If value is multifaceted, then how do creators connect the dots between its various forms in what, after all, is an industry?

I must admit that I first watched the video with the sound off (I was in public and realized  that I didn’t have my headphones with me).  I must also admit that after watching the video with the sound on, I still prefer the silent version. If, as a cursory glance at the comments on various sites reveal, I am not the only one who found the video amazing and the music a little boring, then the question of the relationship of visual experimentation to musical sound brings up the issue artists have been facing since the first seconds of Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” arrived on television screens in 1981.  How do artists mix visual innovation with musical experimentation so that the music and the visuals feed off each other to create new forms of value that impel us as listeners to become evangelists for bands, embed videos, buy concert tickets, wear T-shirts, and perhaps even buy music?

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