{"id":638261,"date":"2026-04-29T10:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T10:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/638261\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T10:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T10:40:08","slug":"indie-music-has-been-invaded-by-fake-fans-and-cynical-viral-campaigns-heres-how-deep-it-all-goes-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/638261\/","title":{"rendered":"Indie music has been invaded by fake fans and cynical viral campaigns\u200b. Here\u2019s how deep it all goes | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you get more fomo than usual from last year\u2019s Glastonbury? Did you see a video of Overmono or Lorde or Self Esteem that made you seethe with jealousy? That may have been because more of your friends genuinely did attend the festival last year \u2013 or it could be because those acts, and 25 others<\/a> including Fatboy Slim, Charli xcx and Doechii, paid a digital marketing agency that sent influencers and content creators to watch their sets and upload organic-looking clips to social media.<\/p>\n

Take a quick look at Your Culture\u2019s Instagram page and you\u2019ll find that the boutique UK agency had a hand in disseminating some of 2025\u2019s most viral live music moments: the Last Dinner Party\u2019s raucous \u201cmedieval sleaze\u201d album launch party; Chappell Roan\u2019s headline set at Reading festival<\/a>. If you saw video from Calum Scott\u2019s surprise set at St Pancras International last year, or Alex Warren\u2019s outside Warren Street, it\u2019s likely because of Your Culture. An Instagram post from January<\/a> boasts that the brand \u201cworked with 55% of the nominees\u201d of the most recent Brit awards.<\/p>\n

It has long been understood that political parties<\/a> and A-list actors<\/a> use social media platforms to create fake sentiment. Music fans may also expect it of mainstream pop stars \u2013 but not so much in indie music, where there is still an expectation that online discourse comes from real fans.<\/p>\n

Chappell Roan performing at Leeds festival, 2025. Photograph: Matthew Eachus<\/p>\n

That illusion was shattered earlier this month when Reddit users and musician Eliza McLamb highlighted a recent Billboard interview with Chaotic Good Projects, a marketing company that specialises in disseminating music on TikTok. Chaotic Good\u2019s roster features many of 2025\u2019s biggest breakouts, including Geese<\/a> and their frontman Cameron Winter\u2019s solo project, plus Sombr, Warren, Oklou, Zara Larsson, Mk.gee and Dijon.<\/p>\n

Chaotic Good uses a variety of methods to manufacture a positive sentiment around an artist. There are narrative campaigns, designed to push a specific story about the artist by paying microinfluencers and music-discourse accounts to post about them. There are user-generated-content campaigns, which employ Chaotic Good\u2019s network of affiliated influencers to share specific types of content soundtracked by specific songs from the artist. And there are fanpage campaigns, wherein Chaotic Good creates and maintains social media accounts of fake fans for the artist. These accounts post a variety of content \u2013 including clips from music videos, concert footage, and posters for upcoming tours \u2013 all with captions about how brilliant they are, in a tone that skews young and zealous.<\/p>\n

Since the interview went viral, many of the above artists have faced accusations that their success is confected, Geese and Winter especially. (Geese offered no comment when contacted by the Guardian.) But according to multiple sources, this kind of marketing has long been employed by indie and major label artists alike.<\/p>\n

Other firms offering similar services include Byword<\/a>, which promises campaigns \u201crooted in the marriage of contextualisation and cross-pollination\u201d. Its client list overlaps with Chaotic Good\u2019s \u2013 including Oklou, Mk.gee, Geese and Winter \u2013 and has included Depeche Mode and Dominic Fike. There are also older, more influencer-focused agencies such as Creed Media<\/a>, which has been described as \u201cthe agency behind some of the most viral songs on TikTok\u201d, and Flighthouse<\/a>, which works with musicians as well as film studios. There is also an automated service, Floodify<\/a>: for less than $200, artists can have their music hosted on posts from hundreds or even thousands of TikTok accounts, many of them owned and operated by Floodify, which set the music to viral \u2013 and generally banal \u2013 video formats such as surrealist AI \u201cbrainrot\u201d animations or edits of YouTubers reacting to things.<\/p>\n

It is well known that majors and indies often operate fake fan pages for their artists. In some instances, as with former Fifth Harmony singer Normani, it has also been suggested that artists are running fan pages<\/a> themselves (Normani neither confirmed nor denied this). Even unsigned acts do it: many sources I spoke to mentioned a manager who disseminated clips of his buzzy young artist on various fake TikTok accounts in order to drive a bidding war between labels, securing them a healthy record deal and a plum support slot on one of the year\u2019s biggest tours.<\/p>\n

In many ways, this is the oldest music marketing trick in the book \u2013 akin to a new version of 20th-century payola strategies, when labels would pay radio programmers or record stores to promote a single. Hype is rarely truly organic, instead resulting from tit-for-tat agreements between publicists and editors, agents and festival bookers. Yet the recent revelations have left many fans feeling duped. Genuine Geese fanpages are alight with debate about whether the band\u2019s success can still be seen as legitimate. Meanwhile many listeners who were already sceptical of the hype around Geese and Winter are revelling in the \u201cproof\u201d that they were right. The somewhat hysterical discourse speaks to the fact that, even in the streaming era, listeners felt that indie music offered respite from an increasingly corporate music world.<\/p>\n

Mk.gee performing in London in 2024. Photograph: Sonja Horsman\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cI forgot the general music consumer doesn\u2019t realise there\u2019s a million companies that do this, and that this is just a symptom of a larger marketing trend that\u2019s been happening for a decade now,\u201d says Jack, a music manager who recently employed Chaotic Good to boost his artist (Jack requested anonymity). Listeners are familiar with conventional advertising, he says, but for many of them, \u201cthis idea that you can create an atmosphere that incepts people\u2019s opinions is crossing a line. Even though every public figure who uses marketing does something like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jack\u2019s attitude was: \u201cIf you can\u2019t beat them, join them.\u201d Spending on, say, Facebook and Instagram ads isn\u2019t effective if competitors have \u201ca million fan accounts working for them\u201d. So he contracted Chaotic Good to create a handful of fake TikTok fan accounts, each posting videos three times a day, aiming to \u201cencourage discourse through seeding bespoke narratives\u201d: in this case, that Jack\u2019s artist is a prestige songwriter, among other objectives. The package cost $2,000 (\u00a31490) a month with a minimum nine-month term, according to a marketing deck seen by the Guardian. But after Chaotic Good bragged about manufacturing virality in its Billboard interview, Jack began to worry that it \u201ccould overshadow all the super hard work the artists I work with have been doing, just because we decided to fuck around a little on TikTok.\u201d<\/p>\n

Your Culture\u2019s creator marketing service is different: the agency sends a set number of flesh-and-blood TikTok creators to a gig to post about it favourably, charging clients \u00a3200 a pop, sometimes with a minimum spend of \u00a32,000. Laura, a marketing professional who has worked with major labels and indies, and who also requested anonymity, says doing this can be \u201ca gamble\u201d because clients can\u2019t choose which creators attend each show \u2013 meaning that \u201cthey\u2019re not necessarily genuine fans, and their [viewers] aren\u2019t necessarily going to be fans of what they\u2019re posting\u201d. In Laura\u2019s experience, Your Culture\u2019s service is useful \u201cif you\u2019re trying to show that a band is having a moment\u201d, but can also feel \u201clike a box-ticking exercise\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also debatable whether these campaigns are strictly legal in the UK. The Federal Trade Commission has deemed<\/a> this kind of marketing legal in the US, but per the UK Competition and Markets Authority, any time a social media creator has been \u201cincentivised to promote, endorse or review a product\u201d, they must clearly label the content as an advertisement. But the guidance for creators is aimed at product endorsement \u2013 for example a clothing item or cleaning product \u2013 which doesn\u2019t cover what agencies such as Your Culture and Chaotic Good do.<\/p>\n

When a song by her management client started to gain traction on TikTok, artist manager Anna \u2013 not her real name \u2013 employed Chaotic Good to generate more content around it. This was a user-generated-content campaign, so Chaotic Good contacted the owners of meme pages, song-lyric accounts, and those who post montages of TV shows and movies, and paid them to use Anna\u2019s client\u2019s song in their posts. Working with such agencies is only worth it off the back of organic groundswell, Anna says \u2013 although that does make it impossible to measure tangible benefits. Her artist\u2019s song numbers went up, \u201cbut I don\u2019t know whether to attribute that to them or if it was just the natural trajectory of what that song was going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

(From left) Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman of Chaotic Good talking at SXSW, Austin, Texas, in March. Photograph: Billboard\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Agencies such as Chaotic Good offer \u201cthe illusion of really helping\u201d, she says, when realistically, \u201call of these things are kind of a complete hoax\u201d. What is successful on TikTok changes by the week. \u201cNo one actually knows the answer, so it\u2019s just people who do really well at pretending like they know the answer. I think they would say that themselves.\u201d (Chaotic Good, Your Culture and Byword did not respond to repeat interview requests from the Guardian.)<\/p>\n

Before the outcry, the awareness that indie artists are employing these services had spooked other managers and labels into hiring them too. Jane, an executive at a medium-sized indie label who also requested anonymity, says that, last summer, as the hype around Geese and Winter surged, managers she worked with started expressing concern that they needed to be employing agencies like Chaotic Good. \u201cEveryone was like, \u2018Oh, is this the new baseline?\u2019\u201d Jane says that she was shocked to find out that indie artists were employing these services, having imagined her peers were holding to \u201cthis inherent code of ethics where we\u2019re not really practising the same skeezy marketing tactics that major labels are\u201d.<\/p>\n

There is a house-of-cards feeling to all of these campaigns. Traditional print or digital advertisements, and even social media ads, have long been losing efficacy. But streaming audiences keep growing; there is marketing money to be spent, and a handful of companies with vague promises of \u201cnarrativisation\u201d and \u201corganic growth\u201d have stepped in to fill the void. But Geese were already popular before they employed Chaotic Good, and social media sentiment wasn\u2019t what drove critic-led outlets such as Stereogum and the New Yorker to name their 2025 album Getting Killed the best of the year. A few extra TikTok clips of Chappell Roan don\u2019t change the fact that she is one of the biggest artists of her generation, chiefly due to the quality of her songwriting and stagecraft. Recent weeks, however, have shown that these campaigns can wreak very real damage: no marketing spend can buy a genuine fan connection \u2013 as opposed to simply engaging \u201clean-back\u201d listeners \u2013 and it\u2019s the genuine fans who now feel betrayed.<\/p>\n

Alex Warren performing in London earlier this month. Photograph: Jim Dyson\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

According to Jack, in many cases, artists \u2013 busy with writing music and touring \u2013 don\u2019t realise where their marketing budget is going, To him, it\u2019s all in keeping with the murky ethics of operating in today\u2019s music industry \u2013 no different to sharing music on Spotify, a platform often criticised for its low royalty rates or for previously running recruitment advertisements for ICE<\/a>. \u201cThis is the same sort of moral quandary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anton Teichmann, a Berlin-based manager and founder of the indie label Mansions and Millions \u2013 home to artists including Discovery Zone and Sean Nicholas Savage \u2013 argues that the use of these agencies is evidence of a music industry that is closed off to artists without big budgets. In a widely shared recent Instagram post, Teichmann wrote that \u201cthe same few platforms now control access to audiences, and of course they want to charge anyone trying to break through that barrier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that organisations such as Chaotic Good claim to drive music discovery \u2013 rather than community-based underground scenes \u2013 \u201cI, even as a small indie label, have to basically compete in the same arena as [big pop artists] whether I like it or not\u201d, Teichmann says. \u201cWe need to bring some kind of transparency to how these things are being done, because we are being told that it\u2019s a level playing field, but that\u2019s just not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laura, however, remains sceptical as to whether this kind of marketing even works. \u201cThe interesting thing about Geese is that the streaming numbers are actually quite low,\u201d she says. \u201cFor the amount Geese are being talked about right now, you\u2019d think that number would be a lot higher, and I wonder if it\u2019s because some of the hype has been inflated.\u201d And Anna and Jack insist that these campaigns only work if fans already like your artist in some capacity. \u201cYou can\u2019t contrive the moment if there\u2019s nothing else going on,\u201d says Anna.<\/p>\n

Even so, the Chaotic Good debacle has sown mistrust among committed fans who are now destined to question how genuine the success of their favourite \u201cindie\u201d artist is in the future. Jack says the response also speaks to the ugly revelation that everyone seems to be trying to manipulate the algorithm these days. Perhaps it shouldn\u2019t have taken them so long to realise, he says. \u201cI\u2019m also like, \u2018most of the internet is bullshit\u2019. Maybe people needed to wake up.\u201d<\/p>\n