Social Media and Art Expand Indie Artist's Audience

Woodkid's Iron EP gets exposure courtesy of free advertising

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 at 12:03 pm | Darryl Gladstone

It’s not everyday that you get to see the large-scale expansion of a music career via a piece of art that’s racking up double-takes all over Tumblr. The piece of art seen left is a surrealist portrait of acclaimed video director, Yoann Lemoine.

His name may sound familiar when you consider the production company that he keeps. Hype Williams and David LaChapelle are always handy producers to have on set when you’re producing your films/music videos. But it shouldn’t be hard for him considering he’s directed the music videos for Katy Perry’s “Teenage Draeam,” Taylor Swift’s “Back to December” and the Mystery Jets’ “Dreaming of Another World.” With that much artistic swag on his résumé, it’s hard to imagine that he would need to do much if he wanted to switch from directing the videos for the music to actually composing the music himself.

Well, if anything, that’s exactly what he proved yesterday. On October 23, Lemoine’s surrealist portrait introduced an entirely new audience of people to the up-and-coming indie artist on the scene, Woodkid. Although his first EP, Iron was released back in late March of this year, the simple circulation of this stunning art piece and a link to the video for his first single did more in a day than most promotion and advertising teams do in an entire month.

The power of social media comes as no surprise. After all, Soulja Boy was discovered on YouTube. Whether or not that discovery was really ground-breaking or not is still up for debate. However, social media usually doesn’t help kick off a lot of indie artists' careers. If anything, more mainstream and popular music artists are taken from that happy world of social media self-promotion, comprised of sites like YouTube, SoundCloud, MySpace, and etc.

With that being said, the music video for the alternative singer/songwriter single, “Iron,” is without a doubt, a black and white masterpiece. When clicking on the Tumblr radar-featured portrait (which doubles as the EP’s artwork), one can be bought to the blog post where the link for the video will bring you to Woodkid’s website.

To prove the power of social media, the Vimeo statistics for the music video showed that he had the highest number of hits that week with 2,156 views. Impresive, huh?

If you truly wish to find out more about this still-on-the-rise star, listen to his music by downloading the Iron EP here and watch the video below.