Noshea Nikbal (3:52)

This is their album. It's called Getting Killed here with the song Taxes Geese.

Shard d'Souza (4:01)

A few months before that, their frontman, Cameron Winter, had released an almost Rufus Wainwright esque album of kind of piano folk songs, Love Will. And then, you know, over the course of 2025, both geese and Cam Winter both kind of like, blew up.

Host/Interviewer (4:28)

And so what happened in the last month to call all that sort of genuine fandom and rise into question at

Shard d'Souza (4:39)

south by Southwest in Austin, which is a big kind of music and tech kind of industry festival, Billboard, which is kind of like the main music trade magazine, did a live podcast with the two founders of an agency called Chaotic Good Projects.

Jesse Coren or Andrew Spellman (4:53)

How do songs go viral today in this incredibly crowded landscape? I'm joined here by Jesse Coren and Andrew Spellman. They are the founders of Chaotic Good, which is a digital agency used by so many people it's hard to count. But a lot of labels hire them, artists, managers, all in the service of breaking their songs online.

Shard d'Souza (5:13)

The two guys kind of talked about how one of the services they offer is essentially the creation of fake fan accounts or kind of like fake social sentiment to kind of like boost a certain artist. And they were kind of bragging, they were talking quite openly about this idea that they were able to manufacture virality for anyone.

Jesse Coren or Andrew Spellman (5:29)

One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments, which, you know, is a reminder to us of, like, we can help. And I don't know if this will make anyone feel better, but we can. You know, a lot of what we do on sort of the narrative side will be, you know, controlling the discourse. And so, you know, I think most people see a video or see something about, you know, an album that came out, and it's like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion, even when they haven't heard the whole album. So it's really important for us to make sure that we are ahead of it and controlling that narrative and making sure it's in the direction that we want, I think.

Shard d'Souza (6:08)

And so a couple of people on Reddit and also a substacker named Eliza McGlynn who's a musician, saw that podcast and dug around a bit and saw that Geese and Cameron Winter as well as a bunch of, I would say the biggest breakout artists of 2025, you know, including OK Lu, who's like a French kind of underground electronic singer, McGee, who obviously had a big hand in Justin Bieber's last album, and Dijon, who also had a big record last year and also works with Bieber. A bunch of kind of the biggest success stories of last year were all clients of Chaotic Good. So after that was kind of revealed, all hell kind of broke loose.

Noshea Nikbal (6:49)

Half of your favorite artist fans are fake.

Shard d'Souza (6:53)

Uh oh, guys. Geese is confirmed in industry plan. The fanfare.

Chaotic Good Representative (6:57)

If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome.

Host/Interviewer (7:11)

Right? So suddenly the excitement around the band didn't seem so real anymore. And it's been a really big deal because it's caught fans off guard. Partly because unlike Dua Lipa or some massive other star where we expect that some of their buzz is fate, you know, Frank Sinatra's publicist did famously pay fans to scream at his gigs, for instance. When it comes to 20 something artists from Brooklyn, do people just expect a lot more or at least something that resembles so called authenticity?

Shard d'Souza (7:42)

I think there's an understanding, you know, going back to like the 90s of this kind of pseudo code of ethics, I guess. You know, this idea that in indie music, you know, there's not much money, but we're a community and we all kind of band together and do things the honest way, quote unquote. And then also that in recent years indie music has been maybe a refuge from a kind of corporatized world and a tech influenced world that has become harder and harder to trust.

Host/Interviewer (8:11)

There's a disdain for the commercial element of it. All.

Shard d'Souza (8:14)

Right, Yeah, I think that barrier between the commercial and the quote unquote underground has always been more porous than it might initially seem. You know, going back a decade, you had people like Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend writing songs for Beyonce. And you've always had artists going from the indie worlds, let's say like, you know, Florence the Machine or someone, and then kind of being catapulted to the kind of mainstream pop world. But I think especially when it's like indie rock bands, quote unquote. I think people still have a lot of hang ups about, you know, being real, quote unquote.

Host/Interviewer (8:46)

Rashad, you have written a piece about the mechanics of this kind of secretive marketing campaign behind actually some of the biggest stars in music. Can you tell me more about this company, Chaotic Good, who, as you said, have been at the center of this Geese controversy?

Shard d'Souza (9:02)

Yeah, so they offer a bunch of different services, but basically one of the main ones that people are talking about is this kind of fan page service they offer where one of their staff members will make a bunch of TikTok fan pages for your artist and post on them a few times a day. I spoke to a lot of people for this story and someone I spoke to characterized Chaotic Goods kind of stuff as like 25, 21 year olds, each with seven phones.

Host/Interviewer (9:27)

Right.

Shard d'Souza (9:28)

And so they're all kind of like on TikTok all the time, you know, posting under different guises with different accounts and that kind of thing.

Chaotic Good Representative (9:34)

They get the song on videos, they share live clips, basically they disseminate the band's music far and wide, inorganically, quote,

Shard d'Souza (9:41)

you know, the outcomes of what they do are kind of a little obfuscated. I think. No one can really tell whether this stuff works. But yeah, essentially it's a bunch of kids fresh out of college posting hype about your artists should you choose to pay them, you know, about 2,000 US a month. And like Chaotic Good isn't the only agency that does this. You know, I heard of at least five, but I think there are many, many more based on what I've heard. It's not a phenomenon that starts and ends with Chaotic Good. And a lot of labels, you know, both indie and major alike, do this in house now as well.

Host/Interviewer (10:18)

And when it comes to how we see that on Instagram, whatever, or TikTok, are they paying influencers to post content or they're using the songs for like TikTok dances. How does it actually look? How does it work?

Shard d'Souza (10:29)

It depends if you're kind of doing a fan page campaign, let's say, just to use an example. Obviously she would never kind of employ these companies, but say it's Taylor Swift, it might be that Chaotic Good will make three Taylor Swift fan pages and post on them three times a day. You know, just clips from interviews or old performances with captions like, oh my God, this is the moment she became a generational artist or something.

Jesse Coren or Andrew Spellman (10:53)

Right.

Shard d'Souza (10:54)

If you're doing a user generated content campaign with Chaotic Good, they will kind of reach out to a network of creators they have and kind of ask them to use a song in their content. Say your single was like starting to go viral on TikTok and you really wanted to kind of add fuel to the fire. You would pay for the UGC campaign, and then maybe they would send it to TikTok accounts that make montages of movies and, you know, put your song over it. And then there's narrative campaigns. You know, these ones have the kind of vaguest boundaries, I'd say, but essentially they go to creators and say, oh, we're trying to spread a narrative that this artist is a generational songwriter. Or, you know, in one example I heard about, there was an artist who had worked on a big pop record, but the artists themselves didn't want to post about it because they didn't want to seem like they thought that was really cool. So Chaotic Good went out to a bunch of creators and said, oh, can you post that this person collaborated with this person so that people know it, but it's not coming direct from the source. It's very contrived, but also kind of simple. You know, it's this weird think of, like, oh, why didn't I think of that?

Chaotic Good Representative (12:07)

So all we do at Chaotic Good is look what happens organically and then do it inorganically at scale. And so, like, you know, when someone announces a tour, for example, like, you know, as managers, that's like, the biggest day of the year is the tour on sale. Like, that is where the majority of your revenue will come from. And these days, like, it's crazy to us, like, artists will just post a static flyer on Instagram. You know, if you have the infrastructure in place, like when we started to do this, the moment the tour goes on sale, you should post 100 times across many TikTok accounts, driving it, pushing narratives, talking about how great they are live. And so it does get overwhelming because I don't think the pendulum is swinging back anytime soon.

Host/Interviewer (12:44)

So how have Chaotic Good responded in light of all the backlash? What have they done and said?

Shard d'Souza (12:49)

They have removed their client list from their website and that's basically it.

Host/Interviewer (12:54)

Right? So all those artists that we could see before, that they were working with, they don't mention them now?

Shard d'Souza (12:59)

No, no, not anymore. The interesting thing about this is that I think in future, once. Once you know that this is happening, it's hard to go online and see any social content about an artist you like and think that it's real, unless you know the person who's actually made it.

Host/Interviewer (13:22)

Okay, so on the one hand, agencies like Chaotic Good will flood the zone with fan pages. How do they use influencers?

Shard d'Souza (13:31)

You're essentially paying a bunch of creators to say they love this thing. Or, you know, one of the big UK agencies that does this is called, youculture and their kind of main bag, I guess, is sending a bunch of content creators to a live show to capture content from that and, you know, sharing it online, being like, oh, my God, I just happened to see Alex Warren's surprise set in the tube station just now. I mean, look, me personally, I'm always kind of thinking that everything on the Internet is fake anyway, you know, I jaded. I've been on the Internet, yeah, I've been on the Internet my whole life. And, like, I've known that this kind of stuff was happening for a while. So I've always taken a very cynical eye to any kind of hype, really. But I think it's understandable that maybe fans would be slightly betrayed.

Host/Interviewer (14:25)

But lots of bands make fantastic records that don't get anywhere, right? That don't get that level of exposure. So there is a little bit of A and a little bit of B.

Shard d'Souza (14:33)

Geese were already on this trajectory, is what I'm trying to say, before they ever started employing K Good or Byword, which is another agency they employed that does a similar thing. And, you know, I think about the acclaim they're getting and, you know, the tours they're selling and that kind of thing. It doesn't feel that out of pocket for, like, an indie band of their level, you know, based on the kind of tours they were doing around the last album. The irony to this is you can't really create super fans using these kinds of techniques. You know, you can make people aware of these artists, but then the moment real fans kind of find out about it, they feel extremely betrayed, which I thought was kind of the sad irony of it all.

Host/Interviewer (15:24)

Eamonn Ford, welcome to Today in Focus.

Noshea Nikbal (15:26)

Hello.

Host/Interviewer (15:27)

Now, you're a music journalist who focuses on the business side of things, which is the industry itself, basically. And you've spent decades analyzing how it works and how it's evolved. Could you tell me, firstly, what are the primary challenges for indie artists trying to get noticed today?

Noshea Nikbal (15:45)

Well, it's a challenge for every artist to get noticed today. You've got a kind of double dynamic of the barriers to entry have been greatly lowered in the digital age. So effectively, anyone can put their music up on a streaming service like Spotify or add it to TikTok's library. And that's great, and that's a wonderfully egalitarian approach. But the problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of tracks being ingested into these platforms every day. I think Spotify has well over, I think. Is it like 150 million tracks? It's an incredible number that you will never ever be able to listen to. Then you've got, in recent years the double problem of AI generated music as well. And then that just goes into this enormous, enormous pool of music that is all competing for attention. Because in the streaming world, revenue is driven by the number of streams that you get, but it's not generating any money. So you need to find ways to get people to listen to your music, to listen to it over and over and over again, or people at scale to listen to your music. So you're competing with a huge number of humans making music and an increasing number of AI tracks.

Host/Interviewer (17:02)

And you've mentioned all of that without even factoring in, you know, the absolute decline in music sales, the difficulty of touring supply chains, all the rest of it. I mean, there are like multiple facets to what makes it more and more difficult today as an indie artist than it was 30 years ago.

Noshea Nikbal (17:16)

Yeah, used to be if you got a decent advance, some of that would go to studio costs, some of that would go to actually your living costs where you could give up your job and you could focus full time. And it's such a common thing for small labels or to sign up the small labels to actually have full time jobs. So whether or not they're working in music or they're working in cafes or factories or doing zero hour contracts, and then that obviously limits the amount of time that they've got to go on tour because then they're not making money. So the whole system seems very much stacked against small independent orders just simply because it's very, very difficult to make a living as a musician.

Host/Interviewer (18:01)

And so Eamonn, in your experience, what does a good music PR campaign look like these days in old money?

Noshea Nikbal (18:09)

In the analog days, it was basically, were you written about in the traditional music press, then maybe that would have filtered into the broadsheets of the tabloids. Were you getting played on radio? So back in the days when it was like a handful of radio stations or specialist DJs would play independent music, if you got on there, that was half the battle. So you got in front of the audience that was most likely to buy your music. Today you've got to be everywhere. That's the problem, certainly if you want to have a career at any scale. So you need to be on what's left of the music press, you need to be on radio. But you also are now battling on what they call DSPs. So Spotify, Apple Music, digital service providers. Sorry, sorry. It's a terrible, awful music Industry acronym.

Host/Interviewer (19:00)

We love a bit of jargon.

Noshea Nikbal (19:01)

So there's all of these problems and you're competing with all of these different people. You're competing in a truly global way, in a way that was inconceivable 20 years ago.

Host/Interviewer (19:12)

But what does it look like now? Who has broken through with an impressive campaign?

Noshea Nikbal (19:17)

If you're talking about breakthrough artists, I guess you could look at someone like Ray, someone like Olivia Dean in the uk, I guess Sam Fender, although he broke through a few years ago. But I think that most of them are major backed, so they've got lots of money from major labels to throw at them. I guess in terms of kind of breakthrough smaller artists, I guess someone like dry cleaning has done pretty well from an independent perspective. I don't know if I can say their name out loud, but. F C U K E R S I believe F C U K ers is the polite way to talk about them. They've broken through. They're obviously an American duo, but they're on Ninja Tune, an independent label and they've done really well because they got a lot of buzz around what they were doing. They've got on TV shows and then that helps as well because TV shows travel in a way that they didn't in the past because obviously with YouTube, like you can perform on Saturday Night Live UK or Jimmy Kimmel and within 20 minutes of, of going off stage, your video will be on YouTube and will be shared and that kind of spreads out. So I, I guess the thing is that it used to be you needed two or three big statement pieces in a campaign. Now you need about 40.

Host/Interviewer (20:48)

Coming up. Can you escape the algorithm?

Kai Wright (21:01)

I'm Kai Wright.

Jesse Coren or Andrew Spellman (21:02)

I'm Kari Sherman and we are here

Kai Wright (21:04)

to tell you about our new show, which is rooted in this feeling that at least I have. I know you have, where, you know, it's kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone and you're just hit in the face with a fire hose of news, right?

Jesse Coren or Andrew Spellman (21:20)

Like there's war, there's authoritarianism, our planet is burning. I could go on and on and

Kai Wright (21:25)

on and on and on and on. But like we're trying to figure out how to manage it, right? Like how do you manage it?

Jesse Coren or Andrew Spellman (21:30)

I manage it by leaning in and trying to learn more and trying to figure out, okay, how can I be smarter about this particular topic and who can I talk to that's going to make me feel better about it and

Kai Wright (21:41)

who can tell me who's responsible for the mess that I'm reading about. So that's our mission. That's the show.

Jesse Coren or Andrew Spellman (21:47)

Welcome to Stateside with Kai and Carter. We're a new show from the Guardian.

Kai Wright (21:51)

We're talking to big thinkers and the best journalists just trying to understand the world from through smart conversation and honest reporting.

Jesse Coren or Andrew Spellman (21:57)

We don't have billionaires telling us what to say.

Kai Wright (21:59)

Stateside with Kyan Carter will come out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday starting May 13th.

Jesse Coren or Andrew Spellman (22:05)

Follow on Apple Podcasts or catch us wherever you watch or listen.

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Host/Interviewer (23:28)

Given everything you've said, why do you think it is that people have been so upset or irate to learn that bands that they love like geese in this instance have paid firms to boost them on social media algorithms, you know, with these sort of faked, almost manufactured hype on Instagram and TikTok and so on.

Noshea Nikbal (23:49)

I guess the issue is that they're coming from an independent standpoint or alternative left field independent music. Their own very well respected independent label called Partisan as well. And I guess baked into that is this idea of authenticity that somehow or other everything has to be real and it cannot be manufactured. Because God forbid that a musician is seen as a commercial proposition in 2026 in that world because there's there's so much romanticization of independence and you can see that dates back to the 1970s and the 1980s with the birth of the proper independence circuit in the uk. If you take the exact same argument and apply it in a different genre. So if you took that and applied it to K pop or explicitly mainstream pop, I don't think anyone would care because they go like, of course it has to be market, of course it has to be how? Because that's how pop works. Because they don't care about this idea of authenticity, that it's the scrabbling or it's the hardscrabble life and then they get their magical moment and then their great art wins through. All of them, from all of your favorite artists had a label behind them that was posting them. Be that Joy Division or the Smiths or Oasis or whoever, or Pulp or whoever you love has had some sort of machinery behind them. They're not like the word organic gets bandied about a in the music industry, which is a kind of weasel word. It doesn't actually mean anything anymore. It's almost like. It's almost like trying to make a false ideological point to say, oh, it's organic. There was no jiggery pokery going on there. And of course there is Eamon.

Host/Interviewer (25:34)

Is there a worry for music fans that the algorithm is flattening out what we're listening to and what gets noticed? And I'm thinking of the fact that platforms count a stream if we listen for 30 seconds, which means a lot of modern pop is sort of front loading the hooks or reaching the climax before you've barely even settled in. And then, you know, there's my pet hate, which is the banding together of music under these sort of tediously unimaginative playlists called Chill Mix or workout playlist, so that, you know, it homogenizes the sound until it's all background filler. Encourages musicians to write to a certain tempo or production style just to get on those playlists. How much do you see it affecting music making and music tastes today?

Noshea Nikbal (26:17)

Well, those kind of theme playlists, it's almost turning music from art into something that's functional. And I guess the big concern is that it's using technology to kind of create affinity or to create threads for you to start to follow. I guess the idea is that what Spotify and Apple Music want to do is they want to kind of take a lot of the choice away from you. And they think that they're doing that as a favor. So they're just going like, trust us guys, trust the brand.

Host/Interviewer (26:50)

Hate it. I hate it so much.

Noshea Nikbal (26:52)

Yeah, so this is a problem. But that just presumes that's the only way that people listen. Some people do, some people might Just want a top 40 playlist and they might listen to commercial radio and the car and that kind of thing, and that's what they want, but that just presumes that audiences are incredibly passive. And it's almost like artists are either told explicitly or to write music that will please the algorithm. This sounds like very dystopian when you hear apocryphal tales of A and R meetings with artists saying, oh, yeah, we need a single. Write something that will work on Spotify in the same way that artists were told we need a radio single. And so it's no different from that, really.

Host/Interviewer (27:33)

So to conclude, you can't really escape the algorithm. You're fine to like geese and maybe listen to a music critic or two if you want to find out what's new, what's good.

Noshea Nikbal (27:45)

I think, like, when people talk about them paying for the TikTok accounts, I don't see that as any different from someone paying an influencer or a micro influencer to talk about their brand or whatever else, because that's.

Host/Interviewer (28:01)

But it's music. It's not supposed to be product, it's art.

Noshea Nikbal (28:05)

I'm not saying that this is good, but I'm just saying that I don't know why this is. Trying to game the TikTok algorithm in this way is no different from using micro influence because they don't like that music. So it's like where we get our references from are all conditional anyway, because it used to be human gatekeepers. So you needed to get a journalist who was favorable to your music or was prepared to write about you, or a DJ that would play you, or a playlist committee at Radio One who would put you on the C list and see how it did. And all of these things. Now, so much of it is decided by the mysterious, nebulous algorithm, and it's all a bit mysterious. And loads of artists are going like, we don't know how this works. What are we supposed to do? And you're kind of fighting against this mysterious digital force.

Host/Interviewer (29:01)

That was music journalist and author Eamon Ford and cult writer Shard d'. Souza. My thanks to both of them. You can read Shard's piece. Indie music has been invaded by fake fans and cynical viral campaigns. Here's how deep it goes, all@theguardian.com you can also buy Eamonn's book 1999, the year the Record Industry Lost Control. That's available in all good bookshops now. Big recommend. Before we go, I just want to tell you about a new video podcast that our New York office is launching. It's called Stateside with Kai and Carter and it's hosted by our colleagues Kai Wright and Carter Sherman. Each week they're going to be trying to make sense of some of the the biggest stories happening right now. The show will feature conversations with some of the smartest thinkers and reporters, not just from the Guardian, but across the world. It's launching on 13th of May with episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can find it in full video on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. And that's everything for today. This episode was presented by me, Noshi Nikbal. It was produced by Elena Biggs and Alex Atak. Sound design is by Rudy Zagadlo and the executive producers were Sammy Kent and Huma Khalili. We'll be back this afternoon with the latest.

Shard d'Souza (30:19)

This is the Guardiano.

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