Category: Music

Fake It ‘Til You Make It?

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).

From Early Nirvana To Phish, A Chicago Fan’s Secret Recordings Of 10,000 Shows Are Now Online

After a blast of guitar feedback, 22-year-old Kurt Cobain politely announced to the crowd at the small club called Dreamerz: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” With that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the riff-heavy first song, “School.”

Jacobs surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band in raw, fiery form more than two years before Nirvana’s global breakthrough with the album “Nevermind.”

Jacobs went on to record more than 10,000 concerts, with increasingly sophisticated equipment, over four decades in Chicago and other cities. Now a group of devoted volunteers in the U.S. and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and uploading them one by one.

— Read on blockclubchicago.org/2026/04/10/from-early-nirvana-to-phish-a-chicago-fans-secret-recordings-of-10000-shows-are-now-online/

Check out the recordings on The Internet Archive.

RIP Meat Loaf

Meat Loaf died Thursday at the age of 74. 2022 isn’t off to a great start, folks.

Most folks recognize Meat Loaf for 1977’s “Paradise By The Dashboard Lights” or, if you’re a generation younger (like myself), 1993’s “I’d Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)”.

I swore I’d love you to the end of time
So now I’m praying for the end of time
If the 4:15 mark doesn’t get a rise out of you you’re dead inside.

My boys like to request and shout-sing along to “I’d Do Anything For Love” and it’s one of my absolute favorite things.

Meat Loaf was also know for his roles in films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Fight Club (His name was Robert Paulson) but my personal favorite is his scene stealing and wonderfully ironic cameo as young Jack Black’s anti-rock ultra-religious father in Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny and the most definitely not safe for work or around young children “Kickapoo”.

Rock at your own risk.

Last year, Meat Loaf was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine to discuss the life of long time collaborator Jim Steinman who had passed away in April, 2021 (which I wrote about in November):

Jim Steinman was such a titanic figure in Meat Loaf’s life, that sharing their saga in a single phone call to Rolling Stone after Steinman’s death simply was not possible. It took two long calls across two days to get it across, and at the end of the first one, Meat Loaf broke down and sobbed uncontrollably over the loss of his friend. “Oh my God!” he moaned. “I haven’t cried until now. It just hit me. Oh my God! It’s horrible!”

Today many folks are saying the same thing about Meat Loaf’s passing.