Everything is clips now

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Everything is Clips Now"

Podcast: Today, Explained (Vox)
Date: May 20, 2026
Host: Sean Rameswaram
Guests: Mia Sato (The Verge), Spencer Kornhaber (The Atlantic)

Episode Overview

This episode explores the cultural takeover of short-form video “clips” on social media and the internet at large. Hosts and guests dissect the transformation from traditional content (like podcasts, music, and long-form journalism) to a new ecosystem fueled by rapid-fire clips, algorithm-driven “clipping farms,” and the blurred lines between organic and paid posts. The discussion ranges from personal anecdotes to systemic media shifts, viral marketing tactics, undisclosed ads, and how these forces are affecting both creators and audiences across platforms.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Era of Clips: The TL;DR-ification of the Internet

[02:22–04:33]

• Mia Sato describes her Instagram feed, formerly full of personal images, now dominated by clips from podcasts, shows, sports, and news.
  • "It's basically like the tldr ification of the entire Internet because it kind of truncates everything we make." (Mia Sato, [02:28])
• Social platforms favor discoverability via snappy clips (reels, TikToks, YouTube Shorts), pushing creators and media companies to adapt all content to this format.
• Sean Rameswaram reminisces about when Instagram was for friends' photos, noting the total swap. "Remember when Instagram was like pictures of our friends' sandwiches?" ([00:33])

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2. Clipping as an Industry: Farms, Viral Tactics, and Economic Incentives

[04:33–07:58]

• Mia introduces Clavicular, an internet personality who embodies the phenomenon: his notoriety comes not from full livestreams, but the viral spread of short, isolated clips—most viewers never see his full content.
• Industrialization of clipping: Clavicular employs around 1,600 paid "clippers" at any time, generating tens of thousands of clips for billions of views.
  • "There is an ecosystem under it that is paid for...people are paid to post this content and paid based on how many views the clips get. So it is completely like a scale game...trying to take advantage of algorithms." (Mia Sato, [05:13–06:13])
• Sean is openly shocked: "Oh my gosh." ([05:38])

Economics of Clipping

• Some clippers earn tens of thousands per month; average is about $3,000 monthly. Clips are a lucrative, if unstable, gig for many.
• Major brands and household names—including "RuPaul's Drag Race," AI companies like Perplexity, "Call of Duty," and political candidates—outsource this work for virality.
  • "I was kind of surprised by how many household names were using this type of service...political candidates, which really gets weird." (Mia Sato, [07:12–07:53])

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3. The Blurring Line Between Paid and Organic Content

[07:58–10:23]

• Social feeds often show "organic-looking" clips that are actually paid placements, with minimal or disguised disclosure.
  • "You would have no way of knowing if the account was paid to post it or not." (Mia Sato, [09:08])
• Some campaigns have legally required disclosures hidden deep in hashtags; others forgo them entirely—even for political content, skirting or violating regulations.
• Sean’s frustration on clickbait: "I've seen that before and then watched the video and then nothing shocking is said. And I'm just like, I hate the Internet." ([09:08])
• Mia suggests users remain critical about the provenance of what appears in their feeds.

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4. The Existential Crisis for Long-Form Content Creators

[10:23–11:55]

• Depressing reality: Clips are becoming the currency of attention, often supplanting the perceived value of full-length content.
• Sean reads a particularly disheartening quote from Mia’s piece:
  • "But over-indexing on the clipped version means eventually the full-length content is a means to an end. If clips really are the present and future of media and reach online, one begins to wonder what justifies making the unclipped complete content in the first place." (Sean reads Mia's writing, [10:36])
• Mia, a features writer, feels this acutely: she creates deep work, makes clips for discoverability, but few clip viewers ever read her full stories.

5. Is “The Clippening” a Permanent Shift?

[11:55–12:58]

• Mia doubts short-form dominance will end soon but warns creators not to trust platform algorithms. "It's so not just ascendant but dominant right now...I don't think anyone should completely put their trust into the TikTok algorithm or the Instagram Reels algorithm." ([11:55])
• The challenge: balance between promoting “real art” or original journalism and succumbing to making content solely for clippability and virality.

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Music, Trend Simulation, and the Ghost Economy

The Case of Geese and “Chaotic Good”

[17:07–21:42]

• Spencer Kornhaber breaks down how marketing firm "Chaotic Good" simulated buzz for band Geese and top-charting pop stars.
  • The firm utilizes “ghost accounts” to manufacture excitement, plant positive comments, and meme-ify artists, affecting perception and social proof.
  • "Their jobs...was basically to create the impression that a band is more popular on social media than they maybe really are." (Spencer Kornhaber, [17:54])
  • Method: trend simulation, manipulating “organic” chatter and meme circulation.

Legality and Ethics

[19:35–21:00]

• There are laws and platform bans on undisclosed paid endorsements (inspired by historic “payola scandals”), but enforcement is weak and marketers exploit gray areas. "It’s not always clear that you’re being directly paid to endorse that song." (Spencer Kornhaber, [19:46])

It’s Not Just For Up-and-Comers

• Even global stars (Justin Bieber, Dua Lipa) use these services—to tilt post-performance narratives and perception in their favor.
• Historical analogies abound: operatic claques, Tin Pan Alley pluggers, disco backlash, and the inevitable cycle of authenticity and manipulation.

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Industry and Audience Implications

The Adaptation Backlash Cycle

[25:59–27:36]

• Spencer frames today’s moment as part of an endless historical loop: new (once authentic) distribution methods become commercial, audiences grow skeptical, and reset towards the next new thing.
• "A certain style of music comes onto the scene...seems like a more real art form, and then money gets involved, people kind of wise up...the whole game resets again and again." (Spencer Kornhaber, [26:01])
• Long-term: Audiences become numb to viral manipulation; "Bedroom pop" once felt authentic, now seems formulaic, designed for TikTok. The cycle will inevitably move on.

The Primacy of “Good Art/Good Music"

[27:36–28:44]

• Ultimately, genuine quality endures:
  • "I think good music still matters a lot...you can’t force someone to love a bad song." (Spencer Kornhaber, [27:48])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Remember when Instagram was like pictures of our friends' sandwiches?" – Sean Rameswaram ([00:33])
• "It's basically like the tldr ification of the entire Internet..." – Mia Sato ([02:28])
• "Some people are making tens of thousands of dollars a month, he claims...the average...was around three grand a month." – Mia Sato ([06:17])
• "But over-indexing on the clipped version means eventually the full length content is a means to an end..." – Sean quoting Mia Sato ([10:36])
• "Their jobs...was basically to create the impression that a band is more popular on social media than they maybe really are." – Spencer Kornhaber ([17:54])
• "In the end, you can't fake it...you can't force someone to love a bad song." – Spencer Kornhaber ([27:48])

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Timeline of Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | Description | |-----------|----------------------------|-------------| | 00:01–02:19 | Opening Scene-Setting | Mia and Sean review an Instagram feed overloaded with clips vs. past photo culture. | | 02:22–04:33 | The TL;DR Culture & Clavicular | Explanation of why clip culture dominates, using Clavicular as an extreme example. | | 04:33–07:58 | The Clipping Economy | Industrialization of clips, paid "clipping farms," and monetization. | | 07:58–10:23 | Paid vs. Organic Content | The challenge of distinguishing organic from paid clips and transparency issues. | | 10:23–11:55 | The Full Content Crisis | Reflection on the fading incentive to create full-length works. | | 11:55–12:58 | Is This Our Forever? | Mia ponders the permanence of vertical, short-form video dominance. | | 17:07–21:42 | Music Industry & Marketing Psyops | Spencer explains how "Chaotic Good" and similar firms game music virality. | | 25:59–28:44 | The Historical Cycle and the Enduring Value of Quality | Discussion of recurring cycles in media, and the lasting power of real art. |

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Takeaways

• Short-form clips aren't just a trend—they are driving discovery, monetization, and even the creation of content itself.
• A massive, often hidden industry of paid "clippers" and marketing firms now engineers much of what appears “organic” on our social feeds.
• The distinction between advertising and authentic sharing is increasingly opaque, often legally or ethically murky, especially in politics and music.
• Clipping culture threatens the viability of long-form art and journalism, reducing these often to mere raw material for virality.
• Despite all manipulation, audience taste and artistic quality remain crucial—truly good content holds power beyond algorithmic hype.

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For the full experience and deeper analysis, read Mia Sato's piece at The Verge and Spencer Kornhaber's essays in The Atlantic.

Transcript

[Mia Sato]

The first post when I opened Instagram was a Slate post, and it is a clip of the Slate podcast. What next? Tbd. But the guest is my boss, Nilay Patel, editor in chief of the Verge.

[Sean Rames]

The products themselves aren't any good. What's after it?

[Mia Sato]

The next post is from an account called Prof. G Markets. I believe that's a marketing podcast. I've never listened to it. Just like, look at this. This is crazy. This is my normal feed. So there's Nilai, there's Taylor Lauren's clip. Here's. I don't know who that is. Here's another clip.

[Sean Rames]

Remember when Instagram was like pictures of our friends sandwiches?

[Mia Sato]

That era is long gone.

[Sean Rames]

It's been replaced by clips of podcasts.

[Mia Sato]

Yeah, clips of podcasts, clips of shows, clips of movies, clips of sports. Clips, clips, clips.

[Sean Rames]

We're gonna talk to Mia about that. More on Today Explained from Vox. I'm supposed to say from Vox at the end.

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[Mia Sato]

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[Sean Rames]

Today Explained. I'll turn you into a damn owl, homie.

[Mia Sato]

I'm Mia Sato. I'm a senior tech reporter at the Verge.

[Sean Rames]

How would you describe what you and I just scrolled through on Instagram?

[Mia Sato]

It's basically like the tldr ification of the entire Internet because it kind of truncates everything we make. And it all goes down to we need a way for people to discover our content. And right now, the way to get people to discover the content is to make clips of it, no matter what it is. Think about the politics videos. You see Trump giving a speech that Aaron Rupar is posting.

[Sean Rames]

Nothing bad can happen.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

It can only good happen or like

[Mia Sato]

sports highlights from the game the night before.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Shamet puts it up, puts it in.

[Mia Sato]

You see this with sort of every podcast becoming a video. I said, cooper, what clone do you wear when you say bic? I don't think so, honey. People who skip the museum gift shop.

[Chaotic Good Representative]

Oh.

[Mia Sato]

The major reason that happened was because they needed something to put on TikTok, right. To put on reels, to put on YouTube shorts.

[Sean Rames]

Yeah. What made you want to write about this now? Because it doesn't feel necessarily new.

[Mia Sato]

The reason I felt like we needed to have a conversation about it is because of Clavicular.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Clavicular is a young man. He's in his 20s. He started posting on the Internet as a teenager around when he was about 15 years old, on these looks maxing forums, which are forums that are dedicated to making yourself as aesthetically perfect as humanly possible. Body modification.

[Sean Rames]

Oh, no.

[Mia Sato]

Sorry. I'm sorry. But it really is a great example to explain what's going on right now, because it is beyond just like we're going to make short videos of someone doing something. Clavicular is really a great example where sort of the. The point of his online existence is clips rather than the full live streams, because so many more people are seeing the clips and actually watching the streams. They know him through these, like, disembodied short video of this other thing that exists, but nobody, relatively nobody, is seeing. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

[Sean Rames]

Is he dead?

[Mia Sato]

I don't know.

[Sean Rames]

Hopefully. And what this is doing is this is creating micro fractures, and according to Wolf's law, the bone is gonna grow back stronger.

[Mia Sato]

You have this person who comes from obscurity into getting, like, a 60 Minutes interview.

[Sean Rames]

I mean, that's quite literally the worst sequence of questions I think I've ever heard.

[Mia Sato]

I kind of, you know, wanted to take this one example to illustrate a larger point about the nature of content on the Internet and how people are working to go viral.

[Sean Rames]

Is there a difference between, like, I don't know, the podcast clips that we talked about at the top of the show and, like, what Clavicular is doing?

[Mia Sato]

Yes, absolutely. Clavicular is basically like the industrialized version of, you know, a podcast that is just posting its own clips organically? Because the difference is that there is an ecosystem under it that is paid for, like, the month between March and April, I believe there were, like, something like 1600 clippers working on his behalf.

[Sean Rames]

Oh, my gosh.

[Mia Sato]

Generating tens of thousands of videos, billions of views, and all of that is paid. People are paid to post this content and paid based on how many views the clips get. And so it is completely like a scale game. It's 100% like trying to take advantage of the algorithms of social platforms and these sort of anonymous, pseudo anonymous accounts are profiting based on, you know, how much these clips are showing up on all of our feeds.

[Sean Rames]

How much money is there to be made here?

[Mia Sato]

For my story, I spoke with one founder of a clipping farm and he said, a farm, A farm. And I'm 100. I'm very comfortable calling it a farm. He oversees like 60, 62,000 Clippers on his platform. Some people are making tens of thousands of dollars a month, he claims. The average, I think he said, was around three grand a month. So, I mean, it's not nothing. Is it enough to have like a full, like support a family? Can you support a family on clips? Maybe not, but brands are paying companies like this clipping platform to basically say, here's 10 grand, make us go viral.

[Sean Rames]

What kinds of companies are paying for this service? Or is it just all of them?

[Mia Sato]

I was kind of surprised by how many, like, household names were using this type of service. RuPaul's Drag Race, Peppermint, you need one. There were clip campaigns for AI companies like Perplexity.

[Sean Rames]

Ooh, look at, look how it generates.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

I like that.

[Mia Sato]

Dan Bongino, former second in command at the FBI, who has now gone back to being a full time podcaster.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

We can fight back or we can get dead.

[Mia Sato]

I found clipping campaigns that appeared to be for Call of Duty, the video game, political candidates, which really gets weird.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

My new job for the next 18 months, probably longer, is I have to be a social media influencer.

[Mia Sato]

So it really spans, you know, different industries. There's definitely a variety.

[Sean Rames]

I mean, we've been talking about the sort of mechanics of clipping, but then for the experience that we're having, I wonder, you know, when I'm scrolling through, say, Twitter, I know when something is being put in front of me that that's an ad. Cause it'll say ad. But I don't know when I'm seeing something organically or when I'm seeing something that's been paid to be elevated into my feed. And I imagine it's the same on Instagram or TikTok that, that you're seeing things that have been sort of pushed upon you alongside things that maybe have organically entered into your feed.

[Mia Sato]

Yeah. And I think one of the things that clippers do is they make content that looks like it could blend in with organic content. So, like, one rule of thumb that I like to share is you can probably picture it now. You're scrolling and you see a clip of the Joe Rogan podcast. The background is black, and on the black background there will be a caption that's like, I can't believe bro said that. Shocked emoji. You know what I mean?

[Sean Rames]

I've seen that before and then watched the video and then nothing shocking is said. And I'm just like, I hate the Internet.

[Mia Sato]

There's a really good chance that you were seeing paid clips. One of the campaigns that I found was promoting Perplexity via Joe Rogan's podcast because Perplexity is a sponsor of the podcast. And so these clippers were hired to pump out a bunch of clips of Joe Rogan talking about Perplexity. And it would be hard unless you checked the hashtags to see that it was a paid piece of content. Because buried in the hashtags it says powered by Perplexity. Sponsored. And even that is like a better example of a disclosure. A lot of this content has zero disclosure whatsoever. You would have no way of knowing if the account was paid to post it or not. Including, like mentioned, I had found some political candidates hiring clippers. There was a candidate in Florida Congressional, a GOP congressional candidate who was running a clipping campaign with zero disclosure, which is, from my understanding, against the law. So, yeah, it is really the wild west because a lot of these companies are not disclosing that they're paying these accounts.

[Sean Rames]

Can I read you the most depressing pair of sentences in your piece that you wrote that I sent to many people to be like, how depressing is this?

[Mia Sato]

Yes, please.

[Sean Rames]

But over indexing on the clipped version means eventually the full length content is a means to an end. If clips really are the present and future of media and reach online, one begins to wonder what justifies making the unclipped complete content in the first place.

[Mia Sato]

That is really sad.

[Sean Rames]

Yeah, whoever wrote that,

[Mia Sato]

that's craz.

[Sean Rames]

It is so brutal because some of these things that are being clipped are, like, artful.

[Mia Sato]

Yeah, I will say, like, I wrote those really depressing sentences because I feel this, you know, like, I'm a features writer. I write long things that are thousands of words long and are often behind a paywall. I make clips of my stories. I do the short form video thing. I talk in front of my phone and explain my stories to audiences. And I know that very, very few people watch that video will actually go and seek out my story and read it.

[Sean Rames]

I wonder if you think from having written this piece on the clippening as you call it, if this is just our moment or if this is our forever.

[Mia Sato]

For me, it's really hard to see an exit from vertical video because it is so not just ascend it but but like dominant right now at the same time. I don't think anyone should completely put their trust into like the TikTok algorithm or the Instagram Reels algorithm because you don't want to put your trust into a tech platform that can change things on a dime and you will have no control over it. I think the balance is like if you are someone who wants new people to find out about your show or your story or whatever, you maybe need to be on short form video. But how do you make it so the thing that I the sad sentences that I wrote in my story do not become the reality where the clips are the justification rather than like creating the longer version, the real art or the real journalism or whatever. How do you avoid that as much as possible?

[Sean Rames]

You can read Mia's full piece in all of its [e-mail] the one today Explained is back. We're going to talk about some real art that may have made its way into your feed that you maybe thought was a psyop, an industry plant and maybe it kind of was.

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[Sean Rames]

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[Spencer Kornhaber]

I don't deserve this.

[Sean Rames]

Nobody deserves Today explains Have you heard of the band Geese? They've been around for a while, but they got really big last year and people started to believe their big moment was a psyop, that people were constantly seeing clips of Geese in their feeds because the band was an industry plant. It turns out there was something to that conspiracy theory. Spencer Kornhaber from the Atlantic is here to explain.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

So Basically this marketing firm, chaotic Good. They started talking in interviews about how good they were at their jobs.

[Chaotic Good Representative]

We are looking for, like underpriced, efficient places to put your songs, where we think your audience will be.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

And their jobs, as they described it, was basically to create the impression that a band is more popular on social media than they maybe really are.

[Chaotic Good Representative]

We use the term trend simulation, which I think is useful. Who are important people in certain genres, like, what are the niches? Why did this happen? And so then we have a song that isn't naturally going viral. We apply that to it. And so we say we're kind of simulating a trend.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

And the methods for that include operating a bunch of quote unquote, ghost accounts that they can activate to show you happy fans raving about music or to post memes and have a certain artist's music in the background. They can swarm comment sections and sort of change the narrative about what people are saying about an album.

[Mia Sato]

This song saved my life. Best drummer of all time. These guys are so underrated.

[Sean Rames]

Screaming, crying, throwing up.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

They can make it seem like the Internet is all raving about an SNL performance or a concert all at once. And the guys who founded this firm gave an interview to Billboard where they're talking about this really casually, like, this is just like, you know, everyday business. And they're pretty good at it.

[Chaotic Good Representative]

If you are building a new account, which we do many times a day, you would never post non trending audios. It's worse practices, but artists have to. And so we view our job as kind of pushing against that and helping them.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Lot of people in the music world, this was a really scary surprise. They didn't know this was happening or they didn't know it was happening to this extent. And then people went and looked at their client roster and they saw all of these names of famous and less famous artists on it. And Geese was one of those names.

[Sean Rames]

Baby let me dance away now is that allowed? Is there anything untoward about that? Is there anything illegal about that?

[Spencer Kornhaber]

There are laws surrounding this sort of thing. They date back to the 1950s when there was the payola scandal, as it's known when record labels were caught bribing radio DJs to play music on the radio they wouldn't otherwise play. And so since then, my understanding is that it's basically illegal to have undisclosed sponsored content where you're paid to do something, to endorse something without actually disclosing that. Now there's a gray area. There's a lot of gray areas around this. If you are doing something on the Internet as part of your job and you put a song in the background, it's not always clear that you're being directly paid to endorse that song. And so I think that's the sort of loophole that a lot of these firms live in, where it's not actually payola by the definition of. Of the law.

[Sean Rames]

It's not paola, because you're not explicitly saying, hi, I love geese so much. You should listen to geese.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

I think that's right. You know, and a lot of these platforms like TikTok and Facebook have bans on undisclosed endorsements as well, but they're kind of poorly enforced, and it's sort of hard to tell what actually falls into them.

[Sean Rames]

Who else was doing this? Cause it wasn't just Geese. Who else was Chaotic Good claiming as, I don't know, one of their successes?

[Spencer Kornhaber]

All sorts of people. Justin Bieber, Dua, Lipa, Somber, Alex Warren, who had the biggest song, like, in the world last year, but also really cool indie darlings. Like, there's a singer, ok, Lou, who makes really delicate, beautiful, you know, intimate, weird electronic pop that I feel like just me and my friends are obsessed with.

[Mia Sato]

Where do you think? Oh, baby, do you think we all already know.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

It was very surprising to see that she was on this list too.

[Sean Rames]

Now, while you might think an upand cominging, challenging electronic bedroom artist, whatever they might be, could benefit from this kind of marketing. Why does someone like Justin Bieber, who just headlined Coachella, need a firm like Chaotic Good?

[Spencer Kornhaber]

We can only speculate, but if you think back to his Coachella performance that he just gave, what happened? He did a pretty, I would say, unusual performance. He was showing YouTube videos on stage and kind of walking around and not showing a lot of energy. Wi Fi, man, come on. And immediately the Internet starts to debate whether that was a flop or a really brave work of artistic genius.

[Mia Sato]

Justin Bieber pulled off a very straightforward, very enjoyable run of songs from the new album cycle swag swag 2. And I just find it bizarre that

[Sean Rames]

Justin Bieber is, okay, being remembered for this.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

I imagine that a firm like Chaotic Good gets into that debate, activates its accounts, posts the best clips of the performance with people screaming about how beautiful it was. They go into the comment sections, I imagine, and seed it with more of a positive reception. And, you know, these sort of narratives matter to an artist's career. It matters a lot. Whether in the eye of history and the public consciousness, Justin Bieber's thought of as has been or someone who's actually in the prime of his career. And so I imagine that that's part of what's happening. You'd be hard pressed to come up with a truly organic example of a musician blowing up just purely from the songs alone. Usually there's some dark arts of marketing involved in the rise of anyone from an indie band, Nirvana, to Mariah Carey to Beyonce. They're all working with labels and distributors whose job is to make their music as popular as it can be. And people do that have changed over the years. And we're in an era where all sorts of new methods are being used in to accomplish that. But the fact that Geese was promoted, had industry connections, that there was a plan to make their music popular shouldn't surprise anybody. So there's examples all throughout history of this happening. And there's also examples of there being backlash at certain points. You go to back, back to the 1800s at opera houses in France where there was these troops of people called the claque who were paid to applaud during performances so that they would inspire audience members to be more engaged and to, you know, like the music more. Gustav Mahler, he banned the claque, you know, because he wanted to bring the sense of authenticity and seriousness back to the art form. Tin Pan Alley, before even the advent of recording, really before pop music was something that you. You listen to on a record, when it was just sheet music that you bought at a store. The way that Tin Pan Alley would market its songs was by paying people called pluggers who were basically like street musicians or musicians who performed at public venues. They would pay them to play the songs of a particular publishing house, thereby hopefully causing people to want to go out and buy the sheet music for that music. You know, then I think about like the 70s, where disco kind of is this insurgent musical movement coming from black and brown and queer people in urban centers and then becomes this sort of corny, commercialized pop spectacle that people got sick of by the end of the seventies. And. And you have the whole disco sucks movement that's sort of rallying opposition to disco and wanting to move back to like a rawr form of music. And people are smashing records in arenas.

[Bombas Promo Announcer]

Fans stormed out onto the field in the thousands.

[Mia Sato]

Disco records were hurled like frisbees. Bonfires were set, bottles were thrown.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

Disco sucks.

[Mia Sato]

Disco sucks.

[Spencer Kornhaber]

So it just feels like this process plays out again and again. Over time, a certain sort of style of music comes onto the scene and it seems like the. A more real art form and then money gets involved, people kind of wise up to the way they're being marketed to, and the whole game resets again and again.

[Sean Rames]

So does that mean for all the people who are seeing, like, questionable music marketing in their feeds and feeling dispirited, that they need to not worry about it so much? Because within a year or two, there'll be a new way to manipulate your musical tastes?

[Spencer Kornhaber]

I kind of think that is what will happen. It might take more than a year or two before you find the next. Next manipulation tactic, because what we have to find first is the next thing that feels real. Maybe this is just me, but I'm at the point where when I go on TikTok or social media, I'm not trusting anything. I don't really like anything that seems like it was designed to go viral on TikTok. And that includes a lot of music that seemed really interesting and cutting edge a few years ago, you know, this sort of wave of bedroom pop singer songwriters in the vein of Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo or Billie Eilish. Now, when I hear music in that vein, I feel like it's totally phony and derivative and just designed to manipulate the TikTok ecosystem. So what I think is that people aren't going to like that kind of music anymore for much longer, or it just will start to seem cheesier and cheesier and people will gravitate towards some other way of talking about and finding music. And I'm not sure what that is yet, but it's kind of an exciting juncture we're at. I think.

[Sean Rames]

That being said, do you think there's still ultimately, like, there's nothing a band or artist can better do to serve their success than, like, make good music?

[Spencer Kornhaber]

I think good music still matters a lot. Yes. I think that's still the bottom line, is that listeners, in the end, have to listen to this music and like it. Even the founders of Chaotic Good, in that initial interview that sort of kicked off all the scandal, they said, you know, we can do a lot of work to make a song trend on social media, you know, to push up its play count on TikTok, but there might be something about the song that people just don't want to listen to. And so it doesn't actually cause the song to be streamed more or people to download it more, or it doesn't actually make the song popular. And I think that is, as I thought, through this whole scandal. I just was like, yeah, man, music is so cool, because in the end, you can't fake it like you can't force someone to love a bad song. So I think that when I listen to geese, I'm trusting my ears, and my ears say that it rocks.

[Sean Rames]

Spencer's piece in the atlantic is titled music's next disco sucks moment is near. He also wrote about geese last year. That one was called finally a new idea in rock. Rock and roll. Danielle hewitt made the show today. Jolie myers edited gabriel donatov fact check david tadashore and bridger dunnigan mixed I'm sean ramis firm and this is today explained from vox with an f.

[Mia Sato]

Foreign.

[Sean Rames]

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