Alt-rock group OK Go rocketed to viral fame on YouTube thanks to a succession of quirky music videos that have featured motorized unicycles and other head-spinning visual effects. But on YouTube, the band’s latest music video is surprisingly hard to find.
On Facebook, however, the video for new single Upside Down & Inside Out has racked up over 47 million views. The 3-minute acid trip of a clip takes place within a free-falling plane as the band and flight attendants float-dance around the cabin in zero-gravity, bursting piñatas and paint-filled balloons.
When the Russian airline with whom OK Go partnered on the video posted the clip to its YouTube channel last Thursday, it was promptly taken down because of an exclusive agreement with Facebook. “It was unauthorized to have on YouTube,” a rep for OK Go told Variety. “This was a Facebook premiere — exclusive for 48 hours.”
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The video was reposted to S7’s YouTube channel on Saturday, where it now counts just 793,000 views. However, the clip is nowhere to be found on OK Go’s YouTube page, which has hosted its prior viral clips. Instead, a 30-second trailer on the band’s channel provides a link to the clip on Facebook. (The clip was posted to OK Go’s Vevo page on YouTube last Saturday as well, where it counts just 88,000 views.)
The venue change for such a hotly-anticipated premiere underscores the increasingly fraught competition between YouTube and Facebook. Curiously, OK Go says it did not receive any revenue from Facebook from the deal. “This was about OK Go trying a new way to reach beyond our fans internationally and we felt Facebook/Instagram gave us that opportunity,” the band’s manager told Variety.
OK Go’s former manager has expressed his displeasure with YouTube monetization in the past as an explanation for why the band has partnered with marketers, like Chevrolet, to release subsequent videos. “YouTube revenue is so small based on how many streams we’ve done that I would say that it’s not a business model,” said Jamie Kitman at the SF MusicTech Summit in 2012. “It’s like finding change on the street.” Granted, YouTube ad rates have significantly increased since then.
