Last year, I was telegraphed a subliminal mandate from the indie rock powers that be: I was supposed to like Geese. The 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?<\/p>\n
The buzz around the band would suggest so<\/a>. After their album \u201cGetting Killed\u201d came out in September, the band was unavoidable<\/a> if you\u2019re the kind of person who refers to concerts as \u201cshows.\u201d When frontman Cameron Winter played an \u201cextremely sold-out\u201d<\/a> solo set at Carnegie Hall, people in the audience seemed convinced that they\u2019d be able to look back on that night in 50 years and tell their grandchildren that they witnessed a seminal moment in American musical history \u2014 the birth of the next Bob Dylan<\/a>. How could anyone live up to that hype?<\/p>\n That\u2019s why, when Wired reported<\/a> that Geese\u2019s popularity was a psyop, I felt vindicated \u2014 I was right! I knew it! I was smarter than everyone for only casually enjoying Geese!<\/p>\n But it\u2019s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good<\/a>, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture 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 at why anyone is mad about a band doing marketing, a normal thing that bands do.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cOn TikTok, it\u2019s really easy to get views. You just post trending audios. But artists can\u2019t do that, because they want to promote their own music,\u201d explained Chaotic Good co-founder Andrew Spelman in an interview<\/a> with Billboard. \u201cSo a big part of what we are doing is posting enough volume across enough accounts with enough impressions to try to simulate the idea that the song is trending or moving.\u201d<\/p>\n When you learn how prevalent these marketing strategies are, it kind of feels like you\u2019re a kid who just learned that the Tooth Fairy isn\u2019t real \u2014 you probably had a hunch that something was up, but you want to believe in the fantasy that a fluttering fae is sneaking into your room, and every viral success story is a fairy tale.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the music industry taking advantage of this marketing strategy \u2014 young startup founders are following the same playbook.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA While preparing for an interview with the Gen Z founders of the fashion app Phia<\/a>, 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\u2019 daughter created an app that helps you save money on luxury products, or how using Phia is like having a personal shopping assistant that wants you to get the best deals. When I clicked on these accounts, I found that many of them only ever posted videos about Phia.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not like I caught Phia in some \u201cgotcha\u201d moment. Founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni aren\u2019t trying to hide their social media strategy \u2014 this is just how marketing works<\/a> now.<\/p>\n \u201cOne thing we\u2019ve been trying lately is basically running a creator farm, so we have a ton of different college students that we pay to make videos about Phia on their own accounts,\u201d Kianni said<\/a> on her podcast. \u201cThis is an approach that\u2019s really focused on volume. We have like ten creators, they post twice a day, and we ultimately reach like 600 videos total.\u201d<\/p>\n On TikTok-like feeds, people watch videos in a vacuum, separate from the rest of a creator\u2019s account. Few viewers will stop to look at what else that person is posting, so they won\u2019t suspect that the post about this cool new app could be an inorganic promotion.<\/p>\n Creators will similarly pay armies of teenagers on Discord to make clips of their streams and post them en masse.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s been going on for a bit,\u201d Karat Financial co-founder Eric Wei told TechCrunch<\/a> last year. \u201cDrake does it. A lot of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have been doing it \u2014\u00a0Kai Cenat<\/a>\u00a0[a top Twitch streamer] has done it \u2014 hitting millions of impressions\u00a0\u2026 If it\u2019s algorithmically determined, clipping suddenly makes sense, because it can come from any random account that just has really good clips.\u201d<\/p>\n Marketing firms like Chaotic Good scale that same approach \u2014 instead of paying college students or teenage fans to make videos, they buy hundreds of iPhones and make a bunch of social media accounts that they can use to fabricate a viral trend. Spelman told Billboard that Chaotic Good\u2019s office is \u201coverrun with iPhones,\u201d and that they have so many phones that they\u2019re treated like VIPs at Verizon.<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation\u00a0\u2026 Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,\u201d Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.<\/p>\n This is the same line of thinking that fuels the Dead Internet Theory<\/a>, which argues that bot-generated content dominates the web.<\/p>\n If Chaotic Good\u2019s content armies aren\u2019t posting trending audio, they\u2019re commenting on posts about the company\u2019s clients to control the narrative. Instead of waiting to see how fans will respond to a new song, they can use their accounts to flood the comments of videos and talk about how much they love the song.<\/p>\n For Geese, it\u2019s an insult to be called an industry plant. After songwriter Eliza McLamb wrote the blog post<\/a> that first connected Geese and Chaotic Good, the firm removed mention of Geese and \u201cnarrative campaigns\u201d from its website. (The company told Wired that it did this to protect artists from being \u201cwrapped up in false accusations or misconceptions about how their music was discovered.\u201d)<\/p>\n But like the unapologetic marketing behind some Gen Z startups, the global girl group Katseye has been incredibly clear that they are the definition of industry plants \u2014 there\u2019s literally a Netflix docuseries, \u201cPop Star Academy<\/a>,\u201d that illustrates how a room full of global record executives turned these six young women into superstars, even pitting potential members against each other in a surprise K-pop-style survival show.<\/p>\n When \u201cPop Star Academy\u201d came out, I watched it in a state of horror \u2014 HYBE and Geffen treated these aspiring teenage pop stars like cattle to mold into human billboards that they could use to sell Erewhon smoothies<\/a> and hair serums<\/a>. But over the course of the eight-episode series, I became deeply invested in these girls\u2019 lives. I wanted to watch them thrive in the face of unrelenting industry pressure.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure that this is exactly what Katseye\u2019s management wanted from the documentary \u2014 to cultivate a fervent sense of support and defensiveness over the girls, even if it means painting the executives as the bad guys. Fast-forward a few years, and Katseye is performing a song called \u201cGnarly\u201d<\/a> at the Grammys \u2014 a track that fans hated at first until, suddenly, they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard not to think about Chaotic Good\u2019s \u201cnarrative campaigns,\u201d flooding comment sections to control discourse. Though I hated \u201cGnarly\u201d when it came out, I decided over time that it\u2019s actually an avant-garde masterpiece. Did I change my mind on my own, or was it changed for me? For as much pride as I took in resisting the hype around Geese, I am so wrapped up in Katseye that I\u2019ve spent hours speculating on Reddit forums about the real story behind Manon\u2019s hiatus<\/a>.<\/p>\n Maybe Geese is a psyop, and maybe Katseye is an industry plant, but do we actually care?<\/p>\n This is not a rhetorical question. The Geese discourse (which could also be manufactured, now that I think about it!) has inspired such varied responses because we have not established clear social norms around what is necessary marketing and what is inauthentic growth hacking. <\/p>\n We, the fans, get to decide now where we draw the line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year, I was telegraphed a subliminal mandate from the indie rock powers that be: I was supposed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,297046,134,27567,5601,136,101],"class_list":{"0":"post-611470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-chaotic-good","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-geese","13":"tag-katseye","14":"tag-music","15":"tag-tiktok"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n