I received an e-mail this morning from Sigur Ros, yours and my favorite ethereal Icelandic rock band, announcing that they will be taking over the entire front page of the UK YouTube homepage tomorrow. Now I know that Sigur Ros isn’t exactly unknown, but YouTube? Seems a bit over the top for a band that doesn’t exactly have a lot of name recognition.

Therefore, I have to assume that their sponsorship has to be simple band awareness (get it?) because I doubt that most people on YouTube would give a hoot about Jonsi and the gang. Perhaps it’s the perspective on Sigur Ros is different in the UK, but I think your average YouTube viewer might find it, as my mother has said, “sad, depressing, and wail-y.”

This YouTube channel will be the first ever to stream a full-length DVD – Heima, their recently-released music documentary about Iceland – and will include a user-generated feature for viewers to create their own Hemia movie using supplied images and music clips.

Part of me hopes that this does get the band more coverage, because the music really is fantastic, but the other side of me wants to be able to secure (and afford) tickets in the tenth row just like the last two times I saw them.

And a somewhat-related rant:

More and more I’ve become annoyed at the amount of indie or non-mainstream bands being picked up by hipster-execs for commercials. Like last year, when someone came up to me if I had ever heard of this “new artist” called Feist who was on that Apple commercial and I had to tell her with mild disdain that Feist had already been around for years in one form or another. Or like when I shuddered the first time I heard Of Montreal on an Outback Steakhouse commercial (Full disclosure: They’re one of MS&L’s clients, but the Of Montreal thing was way before we won the account). It’s like they’re impeding on my deserted hipster island, taking my food and throwing it to the fishes.

Stop exploiting my music, a-holes! Why don’t you go tap Fall Out Boy for another Verizon commerical?