When you got a rock group that got its break on the Internet as in YouTube, you don’t turn off the tap for the next hit

OK Go – Here It Goes Again from OK Go on Vimeo.

File under: Dumb and Dumber OK GO got their break putting their homemade videos on YouTube 1.1 million hits translated into a contract with EMI but now they want to turn their back on the Internet, at least EMI does.

EMI turned off embedding on YouTube. Embedding allows people to pass videos around to their friends, post them on their blogs without actually copying the video.

Seems EMI has a deal with YouTube to share advertising revenues so they don’t want people sharing now. Good luck to EMI. How do they think OK GO got their fan base in the first place?

OK GO is falling all over themselves apologizing on their website,

“We also released a new video – the second for this record – for a song called This Too Shall Pass, and you can watch it here (below). We hope you’ll like it and comment on it and pass the link along to your friends and do that wonderful thing that that you do when you’re fond of something, share it. We want you to stick it on your web page, post it on your wall, and embed it everywhere you can think of.

Unfortunately, as of now you can’t embed diddlycrap. And depending on where you are in the world, you might not even be able to watch it.

We’ve been flooded with complaints recently because our YouTube videos can’t be embedded on websites, and in certain countries can’t be seen at all. And we want you to know: we hear you, and we’re sorry. We wish there was something we could do. Believe us, we want you to pass our videos around more than you do, but, crazy as it may seem, it’s now far harder for bands to make videos accessible online than it was four years ago.

See, here’s the deal. The recordings and the videos we make are owned by a record label, EMI. The label fronts the money for us to make recordings – for this album they paid for us to spend a few months with one of the world’s best producers in a converted barn in Amish country wringing our souls and playing tympani and twiddling knobs – and they put up most of the cash that it takes to distribute and promote our albums, including the costs of pressing CDs, advertising, and making videos. We make our videos ourselves, and we keep them dirt cheap, but still, it all adds up, and it adds up to a great deal more than we have in our bank account, which is why we have a record label in the first place.”

Will it wash? Will their fans forgive them from changing from fun sharing guys to greedy bastards like everyone else in the industry? Are they just working schleps trying to get ahead in the music biz? Hard to say. The public is fickle and they make stars and break them. After all, there is lots of free music to share from people who need fans.

Of course, we embedded the top video because it was on Vimeo. Anyone can embed it if they want and their real hard-core fans will. Anyone can snap the video while they are watching it on YouTube and post it wherever they like or send it around in an email. And people do. It’s not hard. We didn’t invent it. If OK GO is hot – for now – people will go the extra step to break the embedding lock EMI put up.

Of course, then EMI can hire someone to scour the web for all those nooks and crannies where people stash their favorite videos, send lawyers letters demanding take down and maybe even sue the fans.

Most people will just move onto something else to pass the time.

Sooner or later, the big media are going to get it that sharing music and videos is a fact of life. We didn’t make that happen. Hundreds of millions of people decided they can and will do it.

The tide is changing. Most of the big US media sites now have embedding and sharing code with their videos and stories. It makes life easier and it’s all about spreading the news around, right?

The new blocked video is on MySpace and it took about 90 seconds to embed it in this story, which we are only embedding as part of the story in case the EMI copyright cops are watching.