Last year, I was telegraphed a subliminal command from the indie rock powers that be: I’m supposed to like the Geese. Young Brooklynites make good music, but are they the saviors of rock and roll, the defining rock band of Gen Z, the second coming of the Strokes?
The buzz around the band would suggest it. After releasing their album “Getting Killed” in September, the band was inevitable if you’re the kind of person who refers to gigs as ‘shows’. When frontman Cameron Winter was playing one “Extremely sold out” solo at Carnegie Hall, the people in the audience seemed convinced that they would be able to look back on that night in 50 years and tell their grandchildren that they witnessed an important moment in American musical history—the birth of the next Bob Dylan. How could anyone live up to this hype?
That’s why when Wired reported that the popularity of the Geese was psychotic, I felt vindicated — I was right! I knew it! I was smarter than everyone because I just casually enjoyed the Geese!
But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese partnered with a marketing company called Chaotic Goodwhich creates thousands of social media accounts designed to create trends on behalf of their clients, which also include TikTok favorites Alex Warren and Zara Larsson. This revelation has inspired a range of reactions, from feelings of betrayal to confusion as to why anyone is mad at a band doing marketing, which is normal for bands to do.
“On TikTok, it’s very easy to get views. You just post trendy sound. But artists can’t do that because they want to promote their own music,” Chaotic Good co-founder Andrew Spelman explained. interview with Billboard. “So a big part of what we do is post enough volume to enough accounts with enough impressions to try to simulate the idea that the song is trending or moving.”
When you learn how widespread these marketing strategies are, you feel like a kid who just learned the tooth fairy isn’t real — you probably had a hunch something was up, but you want to believe in the fantasy that a winged fairy is sneaking into your room and every viral success story is a fairy tale.
It’s not just the music industry that’s taking advantage of this marketing strategy — young startup founders are following the same lead.
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While preparing for an interview with the Gen Z founders of fashion app Phia, I searched TikTok to see what real people were saying about the app. I found videos repeating the same talking points about how Bill Gates’ daughter created an app that helps you save money on luxury goods, or how using Phia is like having a personal shopping assistant who wants you to get the best deals. When I clicked on those accounts, I found that many of them only posted videos about Phia.
It’s not like I caught Fia in some “gotcha” moment. Founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni aren’t trying to hide their social media strategy – it’s just how marketing works now.
“One thing we’ve been trying lately is basically running a creator farm, so we have a lot of different students that we pay to make videos for Phia on their own accounts,” Kianni he said on her podcast. “This is a really volume-focused approach. We have about ten creators, they post twice a day, and eventually we reach a total of 600 videos.”
In TikTok-style streams, people watch videos in a vacuum, separate from the rest of a creator’s account. Few viewers will stop to see what else this person is posting, so they won’t suspect that the post about this great new app could be an inorganic promotion.
Creators will similarly pay armies of teenagers on Discord to create clips from their streams and publish them en masse.
“This has been going on for a while,” Karat Financial co-founder Eric Wei told TechCrunch last year. “Drake does it. Many of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have done it – Kai Cenat [a top Twitch streamer] it did — hitting millions of impressions… If it’s algorithmically determined, the clip suddenly makes sense, because it could be from any random account that just has really good clips.”
Marketing companies like Chaotic Good scale the same approach – instead of paying college students or teenage fans to make videos, they buy hundreds of iPhones and build a bunch of social media accounts that they can use to create a viral trend. Spelman told Billboard that Chaotic Good’s offices are “inundated with iPhones” and that they have so many phones that they are treated like VIPs at Verizon.
“Unfortunately, much of the internet is manipulation… Everything on the internet is fake. One thing we always say is that all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” noted Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren.
This is the same line of thinking that fuels the Dead Internet Theorywhich argues that bot-generated content dominates the web.
If Chaotic Good’s content armies aren’t posting trending audio, they’re commenting on posts about the company’s clients to control the narrative. Instead of waiting to see how fans respond to a new song, they can use their accounts to flood video comments and talk about how much they love the song.
For Geese, it is an insult to be called an industrial factory. After songwriter Eliza McLamb wrote the blog post that first linked Geese and Chaotic Good, the company removed mention of Geese and “narrative campaigns” from its website. (The company told Wired it did this to protect artists from “being falsely accused or misled about how their music was discovered.”)
But like the unapologetic marketing behind some Gen Z startups, global girl group Katseye have been incredibly clear that they are the definition of industrial factories — there’s literally a Netflix documentary.Pop Star Academy,” this shows how a roomful of record executives turned these six young women into superstars, even pitting would-be members against each other in a K-pop style survival surprise.
When “Pop Star Academy” came out I watched in horror – HYBE and Geffen treated these would-be teenage pop stars like cattle to form human billboards they could use to sell Smoothies Erewhon and hair serums. But over the course of the eight-episode run, I became deeply invested in these girls’ lives. I wanted to watch them thrive in the face of relentless industry pressure.
I’m sure that’s exactly what Katseye’s management wanted from the documentary — to foster a fervent sense of support and defense for the girls, even if that means the executives are bad guys. Fast-forward a few years, and Katseye performs a song called “Gnarly” at the Grammys — a track that fans hated at first until, suddenly, they didn’t.
It’s hard not to think of Chaotic Good’s “narrative campaigns,” flooding comment sections to control discourse. Although I hated “Gnarly” when it came out, I’ve decided over time that it’s actually an avant-garde masterpiece. Did I change my mind on my own or did it change for me? As proud as I am to resist the hype surrounding geese, I’m so wrapped up in Katseye that I’ve spent hours speculating on Reddit forums about the real story behind Manon’s pause.
Maybe the geese are psychopaths and maybe Katseye is an industry factory, but do we really care?
This is not a rhetorical question. The goose talk (which might as well be made up, now that I think about it!) has inspired such varied responses because we haven’t established clear social rules around what is necessary marketing and what is authentic development hacking.
We, the fans, must now decide where to draw the line.
