OK Go

Score one for OK Go. Thanks to… wait for it…State Farm.

Last month, OK Go very publicly disagreed with its label’s policy to block embedding of OK Go’s videos from YouTube onto other sites. EMI’s rationale, according to a great explanation by  OK Go’s Damian Kulash, was that the label gets paid, albeit a tiny amount, every time someone watches the video via YouTube. If fans watch it on another site, that’s lost money for the label, which has invested in the band.

For an act like OK Go, whose popularity owes a great deal to its clever videos, such as the mega-watched clip for “Here It Comes Again,” the tight reins can mean diminished opportunities for their music’s exposure. Even though the clips were still embeddable from smaller outlets, YouTube dwarfs those sites in terms of visitors.
Well, it looks like EMI listened to OK Go, or figured out that it has got problems so much bigger than keeping OK Go fans from embedding videos, that it has made an about face. (EMI is in tremendous financial trouble : this week it was revealed that in order to pay off some of its debt, EMI had put legendary studio Abbey Road up for sale).

Today, the band announced that a new video for “This Too Shall Pass,” the second single from “The Blue Colour of the Sky,” will debut March 1 on okgo.net, and will be embeddable by all for posting anywhere on the internet. The clip is sponsored by State Farm—we don’t know what that means yet in terms of if there’s a State Farm ad before the clip airs or if the insurance company’s logo is featured prominently in the video. All we know is that the video features a Rube Goldberg-like machine.

By the way: State Farm also sponsored Blink 182's tour last year.