OK Go‘s manager Jamie Kitman has admitted the revenue streams the band are receiving from services such as YouTube are amounting to nothing more than ‘like finding change on the street’, despite the Chicago band’s succession of massively popular videos.
“I can speak to an artist who gets a lot of traffic, which is OK Go,” Kitman told Digital Music News. “And I would say that ‘trickle’ is the operative word, in terms of revenue we receive from places like YouTube and VEVO.”
“The YouTube revenue is so small based on how many streams we’ve done that I would say it’s not a business model, it’s like finding change on the street. Our old label has a deal with VEVO, and perhaps they get paid and then don’t pay us on.”
OK Go’s latest promo, for the single ‘Needing/Getting‘, in which the group set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles, garnered over one million hits on YouTube on the day of its upload.