Essentially, the firm creates networks of social media pages (typically on TikTok) and uses them to drive the band’s music into the recommendation algorithm. Songs are dropped into the backgrounds of videos. Live clips are shared. Sometimes, burner accounts, comments, and whole ecosystems of interactions can be fabricated out of digital cloth, stoking—and in some cases, completely manufacturing—discourse around an artist. These ginned-up interactions push the songs and the discussion about them higher up a platform’s algorithmic rankings. And social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube are, increasingly, where (real) fans discover new music.
“We can drive impressions on anything at this point,” Spelman told Billboard. “We know how to go viral. We have thousands of pages.” Spelman has dubbed the process “trend simulation.” And the campaigns themselves are referred to by Chaotic Good as “narrative” or UGC (for “user-generated content”) campaigns.
Now Chaotic Good cofounder Adam Tarsia confirms to WIRED that his company engineered campaigns for both Geese and Cameron Winter. “We helped distribute clips of them performing and doing some interviews on TikTok,” Tarsia says via email, speaking on behalf of Chaotic Good. “I understand that ‘industry plant’ discourse is inevitable, but we’ve had the pleasure of being Geese fans since their 2021 project Projector,” which, he notes, was released four full years before his agency launched.
The long-bubbling suspicions about the band’s rise boiled over the first week of April. A viral Substack post by singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb traced the connection between Geese and Chaotic Good and mulled the fuzzy ethics of such marketing. As McLamb summed up the model: “If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome.”
The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop | WIRED
Interesting. But if these Chaotic Good folks are using the algorithms to get a band noticed and then people are saying “hey, I like that” and buying in, isn’t that just marketing? Astroturf and pay-to-play has always been a thing (online and off).