Everything we like is awesome

Last year, I received a telegram from an indie rock powerhouse with a subliminal directive: “I was supposed to like Geese.” The Brooklyn kids make good music, but are they the saviors of rock and roll, the second coming of Gen Z’s signature rock band, the Strokes?

The buzz surrounding the band would suggest so. After the release of their album Getting Killed in September, this band was inevitable for the type of person who calls a concert a “show.” When frontman Cameron Winter played a “packed” solo set at Carnegie Hall, the audience seemed confident that in 50 years they would be able to look back on that night and tell their grandchildren that they had witnessed a defining moment in American music history: the birth of the next Bob Dylan. How can anyone live up to the hype?

That’s why I felt vindicated when Wired reported that Geese’s popularity was due to psychology. I was right. I knew it! I was smarter than anyone because I just casually enjoyed Geese!

But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Giese was working with a marketing company called Chaotic Good. The company has created thousands of social media accounts aimed at creating trends on behalf of its clients, including TikTok stars Alex Warren and Zara Larsson. The revelation sparked a range of reactions, from feelings of betrayal to bewilderment as to why anyone would be so upset about a band marketing themselves.

“It’s very easy to get views on TikTok. You just post trending audio. But you can’t do that because artists want to promote their music,” Chaotic Good co-founder Andrew Spellman explained in an interview with Billboard. “So a big part of what we do is post enough volume to enough accounts with enough impressions to simulate the idea that the song is trending or touching.”

Seeing how popular these marketing tactics are makes me feel like a kid who just learned the Tooth Fairy isn’t real. You probably had a hunch that something was going on, but as much as you’d like to believe in fantasies about fluttering fairies sneaking into your room, all viral success stories are fairy tales.

The music industry isn’t the only one using this marketing strategy. Young startup founders follow the same strategy.

While preparing for an interview with the Gen Z founders of fashion app Phia, I searched TikTok to see what people were actually saying about the app. I found videos repeating the same talking points about how Bill Gates’ daughter created an app to help you save money on luxury goods, or how using Fear is like having a personal shopping assistant who wants you the best deal. When I clicked on these accounts, I found that many of them only posted videos about Fear.

It’s not like we caught Fear in some kind of “pitfall.” Founders Phoebe Gates and Sofia Chiani don’t try to hide their social media strategy. This is exactly how marketing works today.

“One of the things we’ve been trying to do lately is basically run a creator farm, so we pay different college students to make videos about Fear on their own accounts,” Chianni said on the podcast. “It’s a volume-driven approach. We have about 10 creators who post twice a day, and end up with a total of about 600 videos.”

In feeds like TikTok, users watch videos in isolation from the rest of the creator’s account. Few viewers stop to look at what else the person is posting, so there’s no question that a post about this cool new app might be an inorganic promotion.

Creators will similarly pay armies of teenagers on Discord to create clips of their streams and post them all at once.

“It’s been going on for a while,” Karat Financial co-founder Eric Wei told TechCrunch last year. “Drake is doing it. Many great creators and streamers in the world are doing it. — Kai Cenat [a top Twitch streamer] “It was a success. We got millions of impressions… Clipping suddenly makes sense if it’s determined by an algorithm, because clipping can come from random accounts that only have really good clips.”

Marketing companies like Chaotic Good take the same approach. Instead of paying college students and teenage fans to make videos, they buy hundreds of iPhones and create a slew of social media accounts that they can use to fabricate viral trends. Spellman told Billboard that Chaotic Good’s office is “filled with iPhones.” They say they are treated like VIPs at Verizon because they have so many phones.

“Unfortunately, much of the internet is manipulated…Everything on the internet is fake. What we always say is that all opinions are formed in the comments on TikTok,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren pointed out.

This is the same idea that drives the dead internet theory, which claims that bot-generated content rules the web.

Even if Chaotic Good’s content army isn’t posting trending audio, they’re commenting on posts about the company’s customers to control the narrative. Instead of waiting to see how fans react to a new song, you can use your account to flood comments on the video and talk about how much you love the song.

To Giese, being called a factory is an insult. After songwriter Eliza McCrum wrote a blog post that first linked Geese and Chaotic Good, the company removed references to Geese and the “Narrative Campaign” from its website. (The company told Wired that this is to protect artists from “false accusations or misunderstandings about how their music was discovered.”)

But like the unapologetic marketing behind some Gen Z startups, global girl group Katseye has made it incredibly clear that they are the industry’s definition of factory. There’s literally a documentary series on Netflix called “Pop Star Academy.” It’s about how a room full of executives from a global record company turned these six young women into superstars, even pitting potential members against each other in an amazing K-Pop-style survival show.

When “Pop Star Academy” was released, I watched it with trepidation. HYBE and Geffen treated these aspiring teenage pop stars like cows to be molded into human billboards that could be used to sell Elephone smoothies and hair serums. But over the course of the eight-episode series, I became deeply invested in their lives. I wanted to see them succeed in the face of the industry’s constant pressures.

I’m sure this is what Catsy’s management wanted from this documentary – to foster a sense of passionate support and protection for the girls, even if it meant portraying the management as the bad guys. Years later, Catsy performed the song “Gnarly” at the Grammy Awards. This song was hated by fans at first, but then suddenly they started hating it.

I can’t help but think of Chaotic Good’s “narrative campaign” that flooded comment sections to control discourse. I hated Gnarly when it came out, but over time I’ve become convinced that it’s actually an avant-garde masterpiece. Did I change my mind or did I change my mind? As much as I pride myself on resisting the hype surrounding Geese, I’m obsessed with Katsy, so I’ve spent hours speculating on Reddit forums about the real story behind Manon’s hiatus.

Maybe Geese is a psychologist and maybe Katzi is an industrial plant, but do we actually care?

This is not a rhetorical question. The reason Giese’s statement (which, now that I think about it, may have been fabricated as well!) has provoked such a variety of reactions is because there are no clear social norms about what constitutes necessary marketing and what constitutes inauthentic growth hacking.

We, the fans, now get to decide where to draw the line.