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{{examples}}
 
* An odd example is "Light Aircraft On Fire" by The Auteurs, in which lead singer Luke Haines becomes the bass player while an actor pretends to sing the lyrics.
* [[Daft Punk (Music)|Daft Punk]] have made a habit of never appearing in-person in their videos; in addition, they always wear full-body costumes at every public appearance, including live performances. Their reason for doing this, according to them, is to make their concerts about the music and not the musicians.
** Many believe that this habit is one of the reasons for Daft Punk's popularity. This makes sense, seeing as their "full-body costumes" are glowing robot costumes. Just go do a Google Images search, you'll see what I mean...
* In the video to the Satellite song "Lighten Up the Load", Satellite himself only appears at the very end of the video, in a [[Talky Bookend]].
* Probably the most infamous example of this is the Milli Vanilli scandal; the actual singers were great, but middle-aged and not good-looking.
* Although [[Elton John]] is normally very visible in his videos, and is overall very performance-oriented, for the video "I Want Love", [[Robert Downey, Jr.]]. lip synchs the song. Similarly, [[Justin Timberlake]] portrays a younger Elton (with an eerie resemblance to the real thing, circa 1975) in the clip for "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore".
** Rhys Ifans does the same for [[Oasis]] in the video to the song "''The Importance of Being Idle''".
* Semi-example: For the first few minutes of the [[Grateful Dead]]'s "Touch of Grey", the band are replaced by skeleton puppets. Around the three-quarter mark, someone finally gets one of the drummers' leg back from a dog, plugs it into the socket, and the skeletons flash into the actual band.
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** During one mid-70s gig, their car couldn't get to the stage entrance since it was blocked by fans... so the band simply jumped into the crowd and left through the main exit along with the everyone else. Not one fan recognized them.
* In [[Starflyer 59]]'s "I Win" video, the entire band is replaced by anonymous younger actors. The rest of the video is a mishmash of [[Performance Video|performance]] and [[Concept Video]]; it's played so straight that anyone who hadn't seen the band before wouldn't know the difference (it didn't help that their previous two albums had no pictures of the band).
* Mega-example: the band [[Gorillaz]] has ''never'' appeared as the band in public. There are effectively two versions of the band - the animated characters presented as "Gorillaz", and [[Blur (Musicband)|Damon Albarn]], [[Tom Tom Club]] and the group of unknowns that actually records the music. Performances tend to hide the musicians behind screens, showing them only in sihoulette.
** Although at the end of the ''Demon Days Live'' DVD, Damon does actually step up to the front of the stage to sing "Hong Kong".
** They've played live on the telly too.
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* [[They Might Be Giants]]' video for ''With the Dark'' has them portrayed by small action figures. They end up being killed and taxidermized by a giant squid.
* A somewhat extreme inversion of this trope is the [[Nine Inch Nails]] video for ''Into The Void'', which consisted for the most part of extreme close-ups of frontman Trent Reznor's face, hair, eyes, and skin.
* [[Korn (Music)|Korn]]'s video for "Twisted Transistor" replaces the actual band members (Jonathan Davis, Fieldy, David Silveria, and Munky) with four famous rappers ([[Lil Jon]], [[Xzibit]], David Banner, and [[Snoop Dogg]], respectively) for a ''[[This Is Spinal Tap]]''-style mockumentary. The actual musicians only appear at the end of the video as music company executives.
* Serj Tankian only appears in two of his twelve videos for his solo album Elect the Dead.
* [[George Michael]] did this on purpose for the videos for singles from ''Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1'', as he didn't want to objectify his person and he was in the middle of arguing with his record label. Due to this, "Praying for Time" features just a static background and the lyrics being shown on screen (there's a good reason you haven't seen it, ever). For the [[Music Videos Of Note|more famous]] "Freedom '90", [[David Fincher]] decided to throw in a bunch of models.
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* Norman Cook / [[Fatboy Slim]] doesn't like to appear in his videos. He does however appear in some form in most of them - either as a photograph, a cardboard cutout or a painting of himself. For example, there's a portrait of him hung on a hotel wall in "Weapon of Choice", and the video for "The Joker" (which stars a bunch of kittens) features a miniscule "MISSING HUMAN, ANSWERS TO 'NORMAN'" poster hanging on a streetlight.
** [[The Chemical Brothers]] likewise make brief cameos while remaining otherwise absent from their music videos. They're the skeletons exiting the car at the end of the "Hey Boy Hey Girl" video, for example.
* Parodied by the video for Blues Traveler's "Runaround". It features a thin young actor with a certain resemblance to Adam Duritz of [[Counting Crows]] lip syncing and miming harmonica, in place of the slightly older and decidedly less thin John Popper. The whole music video is a parody of this trope, complete with references to ''[[The Wizard of Oz (Filmfilm)|The Wizard of Oz]]'', in which a Dorothy stand-in and her companions discover that the band performing the song is miming and lip-synching and [[The Man Behind the Curtain|the real band is playing from behind a curtain]], and they are eventually revealed.
* [[Friends|Phoebe]] fronted for a (probably) unattractive singer with a fantastic voice. It took her a while to realise it wasn't her singing...
* Would [[Garbage]]'s "[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqaUZkf52fs Cherry Lips]" count?
** {{spoiler|The trope is parodied (inverted?) in the video in which the band are in fact completely invisible save for clothes but can in fact be seen through TV screens and mirrors.}}
* "''Another Way To Die''" by [[Disturbed (Music)|Disturbed]] in order to get the [[Green Aesop]] across is the first video of their's to not feature any band members. It instead depicts [[Gaia's Lament|a wasteland destroyed by humanity's treatment of the earth]] interplayed with images of the current earth and things such as oil spills and smoke stacks.
* Many of the "faces" of Eurobeat artists are not the actual singers. For example, Bazooka Girl was depicted as Cristiana Cucchi, but the vocals on the recordings were performed by a singer known only as "R.".
* BT's "Somnambulist(Simply Being Loved)" features JC Chasez as the vocalist, but the video depicts BT himself lipsynching. Ditto for "Suddenly", where the real vocalist was Christian Burns.
* As a possible parody of the use of this trope for sex appeal, Von Sudenfed's [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG-CLFPU6RY "Fledermaus Can't Get It"] replaces [[The Fall (Musicband)|Mark E. Smith]] with a trio of drag queens, who lip-sync to the song while wearing various makeup and outfits.
* Ya Kid K's album covers and music videos showed Zairean model Felly in place of her.
* In the video for [[Kraftwerk (Music)|Kraftwerk]]'s "The Robots", the band members are replaced by animatronic replicas.
* The [[Comic Relief]] version of "Is This The Way To Amarillo?" It's not even a cover version; it's a Tony Christie re-release with a video in which [[Peter Kay]] pretends to be singing.
* The British band [[The Alan Parsons Project (Music)|The Alan Parsons Project]] rarely appeared on camera. The video for their song "Don't Answer Me" paid homage to [[Andy Warhol]].
* [[The Beastie Boys]] video for "Make Some Noise" features Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood, and Danny McBride lip-syncing to the song and dressed as Mike D, Ad Rock, and MCA (respectively) from the "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)" video. The video functions as a sort of sequel to the earlier video, and features [[The Beastie Boys]] in brief cameos portraying other characters.
* In live performances of [[Katy Perry]]'s "Last Friday Night (TGIF)", Kathy Beth Terry is sometimes portrayed by Angela Hudson (her sister).
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[[Category:Music Video Tropes]]
[[Category:The Invisible Band]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Invisible Band, The}}
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