News

OK Go Part Ways With EMI

• 11th Mar 2010

OK Go, the band whose inventive internet campaigns and self-directed music videos have set records and won the band a GRAMMY®, announces the formation of Paracadute. Paracadute and OK Go will oversee the distribution and promotion functions for the band and have planned an extensive promotional campaign for OK Go’s latest album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, which was released in the UK in February.

Just as the band saw an opportunity to do something different with their homemade videos, OK Go see untapped potential in the sea of change that the music industry is experiencing and believe there are tremendous opportunities for artists capable of managing their own promotion and distribution. The band, who have always controlled their publishing, merchandise, touring, and all other non-recording rights, are parting by mutual agreement with EMI Music.

“We’d like to thank the people who have worked so hard on our behalf,” said OK Go singer Damian Kulash, who will discuss the band’s departure from the label on the US’s NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ today. “And we’d like to thank our fans for making this choice an easy one for us.”

The agreement will be effective April 1st. Without missing a beat, OK Go will perform on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ that evening and launch a North American tour on April 13th, which will include stops at numerous music festivals, including Bamboozle, Bonnaroo and Sasquatch. The band are set to appear on a string of US TV shows, including ‘Late Show with David Letterman’ on April 28th, ‘The Colbert Report’ on April 29th and ‘Late Night With Jimmy Fallon’ on May 4th.

OK Go unveiled its latest crazily ambitious clip – the video for current single ‘This Too Shall Pass’, which features a two-story Rube Goldberg machine built by the band and Syyn Labs, a team of creative engineers with day jobs at NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory – last Monday and it garnered over six million views in the first six days, becoming the #1 Top Rated (All Time) music video on YouTube.

Kulash has been asked to participate in the ‘How to Create a Viral Video’ panel taking place at SXSW this Saturday, March 13th.

As promised by their tag line, State Farm’s sponsorship of the new Rube Goldberg video is helping OK Go “be there” for their fans: it is embeddable by fans and can be posted anywhere on the internet. A furor erupted last month because fans could not embed earlier OK Go videos due to contractual issues. When Kulash posted a candid and even-handed explanation of the situation to fans, his letter itself went viral, netting over 500,000 hits in two days. He commented further on the issue in an Op-Ed piece that was published in The New York Times on February 21st.

The new video features the album/single version of ‘This Too Shall Pass’, and follows up on the explosive success of their last video, a live recording of the same song that featured 130 members of the Notre Dame marching band. That clip marked the first time that a song’s video and recording session were one and the same, and in only a couple weeks its online views soared past two million.

With 180 million video streams and counting, OK Go – comprising Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka and Andy Ross – is the most-downloaded band ever.