[video removed]
The above R.E.M. YouTube video was posted to their official “remhq” channel this afternoon. It seems that R.E.M. (or more likely some marketing person at Warner Brothers) replicated our Grand Central “freeze” mission for the purpose of marketing their new album. If you look closely you can see they actually branded the event itself; a few of the frozen people are holding umbrellas that say “R.E.M.”
We’ve always been completely supportive of regular folks going out and replicating our missions in other cities. We even started an entire website to make it easier for people to do so. Over the past two months there have been 50 different “freeze” missions in 27 different countries from China to Lithuania. It’s been an international movement of people creating fun, independent events.
It’s sort of shocking to see this video which gives absolutely no credit to us and presents the concept of “getting a mob of people to freeze in place in a public area” as their own original idea. To ignore the fact that the “freeze craze” has already been an international phenomenon and to present it as something that was inspired by a new R.E.M. album is pretty lame.
Imitation is sincerest form of flattery, we suppose.
UPDATE: They edited the video description on YouTube and gave us credit.
UPDATE 2: remhq removed the video from their YouTube account and sent us a note saying they are going to re-edit the footage to credit us in the video itself.
UPDATE 3: R.E.M. decided to just remove the video for good.
We are proud to announce a for ImprovEverywhere.com. With all of the traffic and press we have been getting lately, it was time to spice things up around here. We’d like to personally thank our designer Ken Newell for his hard work on this new site. Ken charged us only $4,000 for his design (which is half of his normal rate.)
