The music industry has been dealing with the internet’s flood waters for over a decade. But record labels are still slow to learn. As anyone in Venice or Holland will tell you: You can’t fight the sea, you can only channel it.

Friday’s op-ed in The New York Times by Damian Kulash Jr., front man for the Australian pop group OK Go, sheds lighton the sea change in the music industry. Kulash explains how OK Go’s record label, EMI, insisted that YouTube disable the embedding function on the now famous treadmill video, “Here It Goes Again,” a video viewed nearly 50 million views on YouTube. Four years ago, this viral video propelled this little known act into a chart topper. As Kulash explains:

As the age of viral video dawned, “Here It Goes Again” was viewed millions, then tens of millions of times. It brought big crowds to our concerts on five continents, and by the time we returned to the studio, 700 shows, one Grammy and nearly three years later, EMI’s ledger had a black number in our column. To the band, “Here It Goes Again” was a successful creative project. To the record company, it was a successful, completely free advertisement.

Fast forward to 2010 and the band has recently released a followup album. This time there will be no viral videos though, EMI says. And the result? “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,” Kulash says.

So why would EMI want to keep people from sharing the video on blogs and social network pages? Simple. EMI doesn’t make money from those sites, whereas YouTube pays out pennies per viewing to the massively indebted major.

Still, as Kulash points out, the estimated $5,400 dollars EMI made in royalties from YouTube is hardly worth hurting the chances of the video’s going viral.

Why wouldn’t the record label want to help their band reach as many people as possible? Either they’re trying to force people to go back their hard-to-find CD shops and behave like they did ten years ago – as unrealistic as holding back the ocean – or it’s a tactic meant to get future concessions from the internet powerhouses.

But even in the latter case, there’s got to be a better way to channel the internet’s creatively disruptive wave. Kulash, for one, asserts social media is the perfect conduit.