T-Pain share GLASYS "collaboration" video

How one indie artist connected with a notable rapper through social video.

Gil Assayas makes dark synth-pop under the name GLASYS, and he’s one hell of a keyboard player.

I don’t really know him all that well, but we’ve both been tapped for a project next year where we’ll be recreating Peter Gabriel’s Secret World Live, um, live — so I’ve watched with extra interest as his pyrotechnic keyboard videos have blown up on YouTube and Facebook.

One of Gil’s videos caught the attention of T-Pain on Reddit, and the popular rapper commented suggesting that they collaborate in the future.

Gil didn’t take it as a sure thing though. T-Pain’s a busy guy, so it was understandable when he went quiet on the offer. However, GLASYS wasn’t gonna just let that opportunity slip by, so he created his own collaboration video with T-Pain, sampling some of T-Pain’s uncharacteristically stripped-down Tiny Desk Concert and then adding a ton of his own awesome arrangement ideas. Check it below:

T-Pain loved the video and shared it with his followers. For sure, Gil was already getting a lot of attention for his creative performance videos, but this has taken things up a notch or two, introducing a sizeable new audience to GLASYS originals, remixes, Game of Thrones covers, and much more.

And best of all, T-Pain ended up making the face-to-face collaboration happen too.

Social A&R?

This is just one example of how the internet has broken down barriers between superstars and “working class” musicians, allowing for interesting connections and collaborations to happen in a low-impact way. Social media has also — perhaps more obviously — become the main means of attracting label attention, management deals, sync licensing deals, and so forth.

To read more about this phenomena, check out the article “Why social media is the new A&R.

Have you connected with any notable artists, or gotten the attention of a label or manager via social media? Let me know about it in the comments below.