Damian Kulash has really taken it to the mattresses with EMI.

You may remember about a month ago, the frontman of virally famous OK Go posted an open letter to the band’s forum complaining about how its label, EMI, had quashed their recent attempts to get the word out about their new album and tour via viral video.

The band has gotten where it is by shooting memorable videos on the cheap then allowing fans to share the videos on blogs, social networking profiles, etc. (See the “treadmill video.”)

“My band is famous for music videos,” begins Kulash’s Saturday, February 20, op-ed for the New York Times.

Band-label feuds are nothing new, but the fact that this one has reached the Times, features a fairly obscure group of musicians and is all about viral video and social media makes it a study in the question of whether or not free digital media will save the sinking music industry.

Major labels have fought the free sharing of content. This is just the latest battle. Kulash explains that labels like EMI only get paid royalties for their bands’ videos when people watch them on YouTube proper. But, he argues, “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.”

This is why it’s so frustrating to come across the phrase “Embedding disabled by request” where you’d normally grab the code for a YouTube video to place it on your blog. That drives bloggers like me crazy.

What difference does it make whether a video is watchable on a blog or on YouTube itself? You can still watch the video free, right? Or, you can post a screencap with a link, like I did with the video above.

Well, it turns out that breaking the circuit does make an impact in the overall result.

Kulash reveals: “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.”

He continues: “Clearly the embedding restriction is bad news for our band, but is it worth it for EMI? The terms of YouTube’s deals with record companies aren’t public, but news reports say that the labels receive $.004 to $.008 per stream, so the most EMI could have grossed for the streams in question is a little over $5,400.”

Only by thinking of media like video as marketing tools instead of products with price tags on them, Kulash says, will labels begin to thrive in the post-album landscape.

We couldn’t agree more.

Plus, EMI could use some good will. Not only is it losing billions, the giant has faced public outcry over rumors it was going to sell the Beatles’ famous record studio, Abbey Road. (EMI says it’s not. Kinda.)

On the Local: OK Go recently played in Kansas City. Read our friend Tim Finn’s review.

Weird: OK Go also recently plied its videomaking skills to conduct a tour of EMI’s posh German headquarters. Huh? Not exactly the behavior of a band feuding with its label. Then again, we could see German execs who are clueless about the reality situation going, Let’s get zees funny yanks vits ze funny videos to do a shoot of our headqvarters.

OK, bad German accent approximation, but you get zee idea.

Four words music bloggers dread: Embedding disabled by request.

When a band puts a video on YouTube, and the band’s label (usually a major one) decides it doesn’t want fans sharing that video on their own web pages, the label will ask YouTube to remove the strip of code that allows users to embed. Through a deal with Google, labels get paid small amounts of ad revenue anytime their artists’ videos get watched on YouTube proper. They get $0 when someone watches an embedded video.

Though it’s an annoyance to bloggers, fans and musicians alike, you rarely hear complaints about the policy. Until, that is, a band like OK Go gets involved.

You may remember the Chicago-born band for its 2005 viral hit, “A Million Ways.” The video for that song, which featured the band’s four members doing a choreographed dance routine on treadmills, became a viral smash and launched the band to nearly overnight fame.

You’d think everyone invested in the band’s success would want to replicate that action as closely as possible. The band’s label, EMI, however, had other plans — and those plans involved grounding OK Go’s latest low-budget, would-be-viral-hit on YouTube.

The band’s response? To damn the torpedoes and release the video to Vimeo (which EMI is currently suing) in order for fans to share it.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

This is actually the second would-be viral from the band’s new album, Of the Blue Coulour of the Sky. The first, “WTF,” came out a few weeks ago and is here (embedding disabled). But because the record was released this week, OK Go was extra incensed by EMI’s decision to quash the embedding. So much so, in fact, that singer Damian Kulash released an “open letter” on the matter.

It’s an interesting statement on the state of the music industry.

First, Kulash explains why the band is on a major.

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.

He then goes on to explain the reason why labels like EMI are so protective of content: because revenue from album sales have plummeted to nearly zilch and labels need every penny they can get, including those from YouTube ads.

So why did OK Go go against its label and release its videos to Vimeo, a site that’s known for rejecting advertising?

So, for now, here’s the bottom line: EMI won’t let us let you embed our YouTube videos. It’s a decision that bums us out. We’ve argued with them a lot about it, but we also understand why they’re doing it. They’re aware that their rules make it harder for people to watch and share our videos, but, while our duty is to our music and our fans, theirs is to their shareholders, and they believe they’re doing the right thing.

And then Kulash gives the embed code for Vimeo. Snap!

This whole situation, however unfortunate, has resulted for a LOT of publicity for OK Go this week, albeit mainly on tech and music-biz blogs.

Still, in a climate where David-and-Goliath stories like this and Conan vs. NBC are grabbing headlines and causing huge backlashes across social media, maybe this is the best thing that could’ve happened to OK Go.

What would you have done in the band’s position?

A couple of weekends ago, I witnessed a fascinating merging of viral videos and cult film culture.

It was a collision of the individual experience of being blown away by the outlandish, random absurdity of a YouTube viral video (think about the first time you saw The Shining Recut) and the communal experience of attending an audience-participation movie event, such as a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

It was deliriously fun. And it was all thanks to one man’s artistic vision and determination.

A San Franciscan of obscure European origins, Tommy Wiseau raised six million dollars and hired a cast of 400 to realize his 2003 movie The Room, which is billed as a “black comedy.” Since then, the film has become a cult phenomenon of Horror-ific proportions. Cult status notwithstanding, I would think any indie filmmaker would kill to have his movie on an underground screening circuit six years after its making.

The Room’s viral success, however, is not due to quality of content. Staged like a soap opera and revolving around a seriously undercooked love triangle, the film is a smorgasbord of unintentionally bizarre dialogue, plot twists that make no sense, characters appearing without introduction and leaving without explanation, jarring editing choices and, ultimately, people behaving in ways that no one ever behaves. In one scene, the male actors are inexplicably wearing tuxedos and tossing a football — one of them trips and is never seen again. In another scene, the female lead’s elderly mother announces that she is dying of breast cancer, then shrugs it off. That, too, is never mentioned again.

If an eight-year-old ESL student were tasked with writing a psychodrama, The Room wouldn’t be far off from the end result.

Today’s ultra-discerning cult audiences are loving it. But probably not as the film’s creator intended.

At the screening, which was held in a downtown Kansas City bar, a kid wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a mashup of the Three Wolf Moon design and Keyboard Cat kicked things off by show a couple of classic viral vids through a projector hooked to his laptop.

Then, to much cheering from the audience, The Room began with a panoramic vista of the San Francisco Bay (a view repeated many times throughout the film) and then things rapidly descended into Wiseau’s badly contrived and innocently narcissistic parlor drama.

Several people at the screening came in costume: there were three black-wigged, tuxedo-clad Wiseau impersonators; there was also a guy dressed as the gun-toting drug dealer who shows up randomly in the plot to menace a neighborhood kid.

Throughout the screening, people cheered, laughed and shouted out lines along with the characters. It was a lot like this London premiere, only smaller.

In the end, I left thinking about how cult phenoms like The Room are inherently viral.

After all, it was through word of mouth that I heard about the film screening. Someone sent me a text, then I got online and learned more about the showing from its Facebook event page. From there, I did some research on The Room itself (I hadn’t heard of the film) and came across the film’s loving yet facetious fansite. Soon, I was posting updates to Facebook and Twitter, trying to get my friends to join me for what looked like a riotous night out.

Harnessing the power of virality is a big subject in business and marketing right now. Brands would love to see the kind of word-of-mouth spread Wiseau has gotten, but many are terrified that the word-of-mouth will be in the form of ridicule, not evangelism.

In fact, as Wiseau himself as learned (or not, as the guy seems to have a healthy case of denial going), you no longer control your brand. Once you place your product before the online masses, you essentially surrender it to people to do whatever they want with it: praise it, parodize it, remix it, rip it to shreds.

In the case of The Room, the crowd that gravitated to it branded it as a cult artifact. And ultimately, this works in Wiseau’s favor. Though he may never be taken for a serious director, when he shows up at screenings, is he ridiculed? No! He’s adored. And if he’d appeared at that downtown KC bar and passed the hat around, would I have thrown in a fiver? You betcha. I’d love to see more from this guy.

Ed Wood is applauding in his grave.

If you haven’t seen The Room, I recommend you seek out the nearest screening — or hold one of your own. Your friends will thank you.

And if any brands out there are looking to capitalize on The Room phenomenon, I’m sure Wiseau could use the sponsor dollars for his next film.

Looking at you, Jiffy Pop.

Update: Thanks Chris for directing us to Videogum’s great coverage of The Room, much of which was spearheaded by Wiseau scholar Lindsay Robertson. We are the better for it.