Social media has an uncanny power to shine a spotlight where traditional media has no interest. Unknown musicians in particular have discovered and exploited this power, whether intentionally or not, to get an overnight exposure to an audience that even the massive record labels oftentimes fail to deliver. Here are just a few of many musical acts that have used the Internet and social media sites to get popular.

Her Morning Elegance Stop Motion Video

This just proves that if you create something cool and original and put it on YouTube, you can get noticed… and a pretty girl in pajamas does not hurt either.

The video has blown up on the most popular social media sites and resulted in over 7 million views on YouTube.

Oren Lavie, who wrote the song and directed the video, was a simple struggling singer-songwriter who just hit a jackpot with this video. You can bet the song itself, even though a very good tune, would never have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for this video.

OK GO

OK GO was a signed band under a record contract for a couple of years, but that got them nowhere. They decided to record and release a video on their own, with a simple camcorder and a quirky ingenious dance routine.

This simple no-budget video got them much more popularity than years under a record label. They released the video without the label’s consent or knowledge. After millions of views, they followed up with another video – this time with some treadmills.

Whether they’ll become a powerhouse rock band or if they’ll forever known as a gimmick video dance band remains to be seen.

Bathtub IV

This story is a little different in that the video was not created by the musical act, but rather by a clever photographer/director who used a tilt shift technique to create a miniature world. He has a few videos like this with different unknown musicians.

This particular video got tons of play on the social media sites and has gotten more publicity for the photographer as well as for Megan Washington, whose music was used.

Saul Williams Releases His Album Online

Saul Williams is a local New York MC and poet and is little known to a mainstream audience. When he hooked up with Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) to produce his album “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust,” the music sounded quite original and a little off-the-wall for the mainstream crowd.

Trent Reznor was on the outs with his own record company at the time, and was openly outspoken about the music business model as a whole. So they decided to do something different with this album and release it online only as an MP3 download and give a listener the choice: Download lower quality MP3’s for free, or pay $5 and download the higher quality MP3’s while supporting the artist.

Even though some time later Reznor expressed that this particular experiment did not prove to be very successful (in terms of money made), I believe it still got Saul Williams a ton of new fans that he would never have gotten otherwise from a record company with such an experimental album.

Some people got his album for the music, while others who don’t really care for that style of music got it anyway to support the artist, simply because they hate the RIAA and the record industry. Tons more people got to hear his name because the story was blown up all over social media sites. So even though the album might not have sold as they expected, the publicity that was generated online alone was probably worth it.

United Breaks Guitars

Pretty cool story — what happens when United Airlines breaks your guitars? Write a song about it; better yet, shoot a funny video and put it on YouTube. People love funny videos and they hate big corporations, so this video turned out to be a big win for Sons of Maxwell, a group that no one has really heard of before.

Here’s the sequel of the video:

DJ Danger Mouse – Grey Album

Creating a mash-up between The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album into the Grey Album, DJ Danger Mouse got a big Internet following which catapulted his career. After the success of the Grey Album he formed Gnarles Barkley, produced the next Gorillaz album, and was nominated for a Grammy for Producer of the Year.

Furthermore, the album was used in a tug-of-war between record companies’ copyright laws and activists looking to change record labels’ practices.

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