Ok Go: A DIY band in a post major label world

24 June 2010

by Bianca O'Neill

Damian Kulash is full of uncontained excitement. He's recounting the experience of filming their ridiculously fascinating video for their previous single This Too Shall Pass off their third album Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky. It features a giant machine they’d been working on for 4 months.

And now they have another video out - this time for their latest single End Love - which shows off their creative chops in stop-start motion. In the end though, how are videos making them more successful? In short, they probably aren't.

Ok Go aren't all about the videos - Kulash is pretty intent on making that point – but they can’t deny their limited success has been intrinsically linked to their rising number of YouTube hits. For a reasonably underground band, they have garnered 14 million (!) views on YouTube for their This Too Shall Pass video already, not to mention an epic 51 million and rising for the treadmill brilliance of Here It Goes Again.

Their videos have already singlehandedly impacted the digital industry, not to mention the way labels view their digital properties. Although they have now left the major label, a recent EMI policy now restricts video embeds on sites other than YouTube (as EMI earn money from views ONLY when viewed on YouTube).

Think about it – the treadmill video had 50 million views, and although they earn only a reported $0.004 per view, we’re talking at least $200k. On the downside, since they stopped allowing embedding the view rate has dropped a staggering 90%. 

All this talk of money is ironic, considering how genuinely earnest Kulash is in this interview. Fortunately, his lengthy lecture on why it's tough being a DIY band when signed to a major label is genuinely fascinating.

“The industry is post that [major label] distinction I think. A lot of people have a lot of very strong feelings about major labels and indie labels, independent releases and doing it yourself... There was a time when major labels had a big stranglehold on access to culture, and so you had to choose: either you were going to go inside the system or outside the system. Now, none of those things are really true anymore. Bands that do their own thing; well, now it has very little to do with where you get your funding from.”

This is all fair to say, but do record companies really have less power over artists these days, or does this latest EMI policy show that, in a way, they can exercise more?

“We have pretty vehemently kept our creative control out of the hands of anyone but for ourselves. We make our own videos, direct our own videos, make our own music. We get to do all the things we want to creatively and we don’t let anyone touch that... We want to make sure we’re not behind the wall of marketing to ‘promote’ us.... I’m so glad I don’t have to live behind this two dimensional image of me, that some big corporation has erected for us.”

His passion is terribly evident. This band is more than treadmills, YouTube views and some great hooky singles. They are clearly trying to do something here: they are a rare breed of musician. In the industry we like to term musicians as 'artists', but not many could live up to that moniker. These guys can; they have branched out into areas as diverse as filmmaking, writing and art.

They have written a play and an essay in the best-selling collection Things I’ve Learned From Women Who Dumped Me. They’ve been published in the New York Times and Huffington Post. They’ve testified before Congress and played in the Senate chambers. They created a charity project where they join fans, walking the streets with food for the homeless.

And regardless of all these glaringly overachieving extra-curriculars, they still seem so… genuine.

“The animating passion of our lives is making things. It’s a pretty broad thrill… The opportunities that this affords us to follow the lead of that thrill is amazing and it’s something that would have been very hard to do before Internet, before direct distribution.”

So if they had all the money and resources in the world, what would they do with them? Well, after all of those assertions that they're not a 'video' band, turns out they would make a music video.

“Oh man, would I make on hell of a video. Can you imagine? Everyone would have coloured suits and we could choreograph it and shoot it from outerspace…”

Ok Go’s new album Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky is out now.