With the release of OK GO’s new Capitol album, “Of The Blue Color of the Sky,” EMI, the eminent UK music company, is telling the band their videos on YouTube — like the new one, “This Too Shall Pass” — can’t be embedded on other sites.
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In 2006, OK GO made a big splash on YouTube by dancing on treadmills for their song, “Here It Goes Again,” that I have to assume helped make money for Capitol.
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Seems to me that EMI is applying the same faulty logic that Disney used in the early days of VHS, when it refused to allow their movies to be rented, rather than sold at retail. The comparison isn’t exactly comparable, because there was money to be made in both transactions. Once again I point out that the first printed warning of the coming age of digital downloaded music was made by Stewart Brand in 1972.
Maybe EMI is thinking that banning embedding will give them time to decide what they can do to generate a revenue stream from streaming videos, like those featuring the Lily Allen, Britain’s leading bad girl of Pop music, who resides on the Beatles’ original label, Parlophone.
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Is Lily any worse than a United States Senator who posed nude for Cosmo in his buff youth, and whose wife was once in a racy music video herself? Isn’t the Brown family only slightly less shallow?