Were the band Ok Go’s recent complaints about EMI’s YouTube sharing policies just part of a sneaky, low-key marketing campaign? Who cares. The band’s new brilliantly Rube Goldbergian video below is way too much fun to quibble about it. More thoughts after the clip.

While taking a look at the RIAA’s peculiar paranoia about Canadian pirates recently, we mentioned how Damian Kulash Jr. of the band OK Go had expressed his frustration about not being able to embed his own band’s YouTube videos because of EMI’s “Embedding disabled by request” deal in a NYT editorial. He sounded like a real rebel, sharing the straight dope about how stupid his own label was being about video sharing as promotion. Well, OK Go’s latest video, This Too Shall Pass is featured above, and is suspiciously embeddable. But none of the others – like the Here It Goes Again treadmill video that put them on the charts – are. Was this yet another Rube Goldbergian mechanism to get us to see their new video? If it was, it was brilliant. The video was streamed nearly a million times in the first two days it was available. OK Go was also ready with blooper reels, which adds to the fishiness of it all. But who cares. It’s a catchy tune, and the video is awesome. It was created by LA’s Syyn Labs over a month-and-a-half using a team of 50-60 people to build it. The band’s basic requirements were that it had to be built on a shoestring budget, not only synchronize with the beat and lyrics but play a part of the song, and end on time with it. Remember, this is 3 1/2 minutes with no cuts. Pretty impressive. Wired has more details about the engineering required if you’re interested.