Grammy award winners Ok Go will be performing on April 27 at the Pearl Street Nightclub in Northampton, MA. The Chicago-based rock band formed in 1998 and is best known for their music video “Here It Goes Again,” where the band performed a choreographed dance on treadmills. Currently the band is promoting the release of their most recent album Of the Blue Colour Sky. The record has received a lot of attention after Damian Kulash published an article in The New York Times about Ok Go’s controversy with their former record label Electric and Musical Industries Ltd (EMI).
Kulash, a graduate of Brown University, filmed “Here It Goes Again” at his sister’s house, and released it on YouTube without EMI’s permission. The video quickly became a favorite among fans and went viral online. Although“Here It Goes Again” won “Best Short-Form Music Video” Grammy in 2007, the band ran into trouble. Uploading the video onto YouTube without telling EMI resulted in a contact breech as well as liability issues for YouTube. “To the band, ‘Here It Goes Again’ was a successful creative project,” said Kulash in his Times articled titled WhoseTube?. Worried about losing money, EMI banned Ok Go’s music videos from being embeddable onto multiple web pages. This paralyzed much of the publicity Ok Go had previously been receiving from the Internet. Without the embed feature, the music video’s views dropped 90%, 10,000 a day to about a 1,000. “It’s decisions like these that have earned record companies a reputation for being greedy and short-sighted. And by and large they deserve it,” said Kulash.
Originally Ok Go released Of the Blue Colour Sky on EMI Jan. 12. Yet soon after the band split from EMI and rereleased the album on Paracadute Records on April 1. “Neither our lawyers nor their lawyers have any hard feelings and, in fact, the split has been remarkably friendly,” reported Ok Go’s official website. Paracadute is owned and operated by Ok Go and will be in charge of the band’s distribution and promotion as well. The new label has yet to announce whether or not it will take on other artists.
Currently Ok Go’s latest music video “This Too Shall Pass,” featuring the Rube Goldberg Machine, has received about 11,750,000 hits on YouTube. Ok Go will perform on popular television shows The Late Show with David Letterman, The Colbert Report, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon within the next two weeks.
Related posts:
- R.E.M Breakup
- Meet Jacqueline Adams
- Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers’ Music Video Featuring The UMass Marching Band
- O.A.R.’s DePizzo dishes band’s latest
- Western Mass’ own Naia Kete performs at Mount Holyoke
