How many times does a band have to take the music video world by storm before its record label gets that its members might know a little something about music videos? We may never find out, because OK Go, the band in question, has just ditched EMI, the record label in question, largely due to that very problem.

OK Go rocketed up through the indie rock world in large measure due to the band’s brilliant, lo-fi music videos, which have spread like wildfire on YouTube. But EMI, in a misguided attempt to wring every penny out of the band’s success, decided to block embedding on the YouTube videos–meaning the videos were unable to disseminate out through music and pop culture blogs, news sites, and personal blogs the way they did before the restriction. And that’s not a minor detail: the band saw a 90% drop in views when that restriction went into effect. As in, 100,000 views one day, 10,000 views the next.

OK Go isn’t a band with huge hit radio singles; they’re a journeyman power pop act that puts out reliably excellent, not blockbuster, albums. Music videos are the band’s way of making themselves buzzworthy, and it works: their homemade videos have achieved a level of popularity nobody could have predicted. So when the label makes their videos less popular, it means, in no uncertain terms, that less people out there know about OK Go, which means less people can buy albums and tickets for the hard-touring band’s shows.

It’s a ridiculous decision from the label, and the band was never shy about voicing discontent, even in the most public way possible. Singer Damian Kulash wrote an op-ed that appeared in The New York Times, a letter to his fans that appeared, among other places, in Gizmodo, and the issue came up in just about every interview the band gave. Now, the band has taken the final step: leaving EMI, and forming their own Paracadute Recordings label to release future (and a re-released version of the current Of the Blue Colour of the Sky) music.