Is "viral" so bad?

I haven't been able to stop listening to that new OK Go album I briefly reviewed in my last post. So I went to their Web site to see if any Philly shows were in the band's future (Turns out the they're hitting Baltimore and NYC, but not Philly this April) and stumbled across a link to an op-ed by the band's singer Damian Kulash in the New York Times from a week ago.

When I wrote about the OK Go, I had hoped I could embed their new video for This Too Shall Pass. For the not-so-tech-savvy out there, youtube has avery easy function for embedding videos in blogs and other Web sites... If I had succeeded, my post on the band would have included a window where readers could easily watch the video right there without linking to another site -- in this case You Tube. But OK Go's record label EMI won't allow the band's videos (and videos by many other bands now) to be embedded.

Kulash explains how the band essentially became famous for a video it made for the song “Here It Goes Again.” The video, made for peanuts, was free advertising for the band, putting their song in front of tens of millions of viewers who might never have heard the band otherwise. It fueled audiences for a world tour and made them a profitable enterprise. EMI's decision to "cash in" on Web videos has made a similar phenomenon impossible.

From Kulash's piece:

Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most. By ignoring the power of these tastemakers, our record company is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

The numbers are shocking: When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account. 

Like a lot of news companies, traditional record industries can't seem to wrap their heads around new business models. So called viral distribution of digital content has destroyed a lot of the old ways of doing business. But when OK Go benefits from viral distribution, and arguably does so in a big way, the traditional record company blocks it.

In the current issue of The Atlantic, there is a story about the marketing genius of the Grateful Dead, a band that made enormous amounts of money with very little radio support. Early in its history, the band embraced the bootleg, allowing fans to record their concerts. The distribution of those bootlegs made The Dead one of the most bankable live acts of the last 40 years. Scholars now think the Dead were pioneers of marketing and business professors are eager to examine the band's extensive archives, which were recently donated to UC Santa Cruz.

I guess a band of acid-addled hippies figured out 40 years ago what corporate suits can't figure out today. You can swap audio and video files, but you can't do the same for the band's live act, it's T shirts and other goods -- things The Dead used to become one of the most successful bands in rock history. Those who want to protect the rights of that which can't be protected are going to lose out.

From Kulash again:
In these tight times, it’s no surprise that EMI is trying to wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos. But it needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn’t benefiting the company’s bottom line, or the music it’s there to support. The sooner record companies realize this, the better — though I fear it may already be too late.

I think he's right.