On November 10th, hip hop artist Chamillionaire [@Chamillionaire] went against the wishes of his record label, Universal Records, and livestreamed the premiere of his Good Morning music video to fans on Facebook and Ustream.

By all accounts, fans responded positively to the artist’s social media initiative. The Ustream/Facebook live broadcast saw more than 90,000 total views with more than 9,000 simultaneous viewers at the peak.

Given those impressive numbers, and the fact that Chamillionaire is using social media to merge the gap between making music and connecting with fans, you’d think that Universal would be satisfied with the outcome. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to case, as after the video premiered on the web and was posted to YouTube, Universal decided to disable embeds. This decision didn’t sit well with Chamillionaire, who then decided to post the video elsewhere so it could remain embeddable.

In an exclusive email statement, Chamillionaire’s Digital Director, Jeff Lange, otherwise known as “Digi Jeff,” tells us:

“Chamillionaire did this against Universal’s policy and permission, they kept telling him not to do it but he wanted to anyways.  I really felt like using Facebook & ustream to premiere his music video would be something new and creative that nobody has done before and it went really well.  Chamillionaire talked for a while before the video to build the hype and played the video twice, and later talked about parts of the video. Fans were interacting using twitter/facebook.”

“The record label Universal removed all embeds on the video and put advertisement on the video. Chamillionaire didn’t like the fact that fans cant embed and share the video so we posted an embedded video on http://vidly.com/bGrS/hd [Vidly].”

We appreciate Chamillionaire’s desire to push the boundaries, and we expect to see more online music video premieres in the future. For the time being, however, we do know that Chamillionaire is planning to make a custom music video just for his Twitter fans, replacing the bubbles (as seen in the embed below) with fan-contributed thoughts and their Twitter names.

Tags: chamillionaire, music, music video, ustream

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Chamillionaire Breaks Universal’s Rules So Fans Can Embed Music Video