Before the people from 1-800-OK-CABLE called, the prospects for Future 86 weren’t too rosy.

One of the band’s only releases was a track on a KISS tribute CD, tour dates were largely limited to pubs in New Jersey and Connecticut, and drummer Armand Minassian was in the midst of writing a book, “Diary of a Rock and Roll Nothing.”

But Mr. Minassian figured he might have a shot at becoming a rock-and-roll something after a production company called and asked the band to rewrite the lyrics to one of their songs to shill for a cable company.

The ad, which featured the band jamming while singing about low, low cable prices, aired on local and cable TV in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, as well as on JetBlue flights, beginning in April. The reaction was immediate. Hundreds of people checked out the band on its MySpace page, while detractors accused members of selling out.

Licensing music for use in commercials isn’t just for bands like U2 and Led Zeppelin anymore. As lesser-known artists struggle to reach mass audiences in a fractured music industry, they’re finding that TV commercials can give them the exposure that radio play once did.

Some bands are even rewriting their lyrics to sell products, prompting some observers to wonder if the term “sellout” is any longer an insult.

“This is post-P. Diddy — selling out is a good thing,” a partner at media consulting company Radar Research, Aram Sinnreich, said. Advertisers are becoming less interested in jingles and music written by Madison Avenue, Mr. Sinnreich said, and are tapping into edgier sources.

Advertisers say there’s a certain cachet to playing music from an unknown band rather than a canned jingle.

“Everyone has a cool friend that exposes them to new things — the idea is that a brand can become that kind of channel,” the president of advertising company Deutsch LA, who helped pioneer the idea of using unknown bands by playing a song from the housemusic group Dirty Vegas in a Mitsubishi ad in 1998, Eric Hirshberg, said. The song became a hit, and the group even put stickers on its CDs linking itself to the commercial.

Indie bands making deals with advertisers might once have been accused of “selling out” by fans, but a younger generation of artists used to music videos and MTV don’t see any downside, the director of music supervision at HUM, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based company that places or creates music for commercials and TV shows, Tricia Halloran, said. Music fans who have grown up with MTV are accustomed to seeing songs paired with visual images, she said.

Ms. Halloran cites another factor: Commercials have become more artsy and less traditional. That’s what convinced Future 86 to appear in a commercial for Time Warner Cable.

“It’s a one-minute music video,” Mr. Minassian said about the commercial. “We’re musicians struggling to make a living — who would say no to that?”

However, a band’s brand might suffer if they do the wrong kind of commercials, or if their fans think they’re more focused on advertising than on making music, Mr. Hirshberg said. If viewers come away from the ad wondering how much money changed hands, the ad probably didn’t work, he said. Rewriting a song’s lyrics to sell a brand is especially risky.

But changing words for commercials is the next step in the trend of bands licensing their music to advertisers, as the Future 86 commercial shows, a senior editor at ArtistsHouseMusic.org, which provides resources for independent artists, George Howard, said.

“I don’t think that’s advisable for a band to do,” he said. “You’re selling your soul at that point.”

For artists, there’s another fine line: the choice of being able to make music or not. A Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter, Tracy Spuehler, has been writing songs for about 10 years but says she was able to finance her second album after her song was placed in a Nissan commercial in 2003.

“I don’t have the ability to get on commercial radio,” she said. “This is one of the few ways to be able to reach a wider audience.”