Last year, the indie rock machine signaled that I was supposed to love the Brooklyn band Geese. While the group produces undeniably solid music, the relentless hype—positioning them as the Gen Z answer to The Strokes or the next Bob Dylan—felt manufactured. When Wired reported that Geese’s meteoric rise was fueled by a “psyop,” it confirmed what many skeptics already suspected: the viral success wasn’t entirely organic.
The “Chaotic Good” Strategy
The reality is that Geese partnered with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good. This agency specializes in creating thousands of social media accounts to simulate trends for clients, including TikTok stars like Alex Warren and Zara Larsson. As Chaotic Good co-founder Andrew Spelman explained in a Billboard interview, their method involves generating massive volume across numerous accounts to create the illusion that a song is already a cultural phenomenon.
Discovering this feels like learning the Tooth Fairy isn’t real. You suspect the magic is artificial, yet you still want to believe that viral success stories are genuine fairy tales rather than calculated data-driven campaigns.
From Music to Startups: The New Playbook
This manipulation isn’t confined to the music industry; young startup founders are adopting the exact same tactics. When researching the fashion app Phia, I noticed an unnatural abundance of identical talking points across TikTok. These accounts, which exclusively posted about the app, were part of a “creator farm.” As co-founder Sophia Kianni explained, they pay college students to post videos twice a day, aiming for hundreds of clips to saturate the algorithm.
This strategy mirrors how major creators like Kai Cenat use armies of fans on Discord to clip their streams en masse. Marketing firms simply scale this by purchasing hundreds of iPhones to fabricate trends. Chaotic Good’s office is reportedly “overrun with iPhones,” treating the firm like VIP clients at Verizon. As co-founder Jesse Coren noted, “Everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments.”
The “Dead Internet” Reality
This approach aligns with the Dead Internet Theory, where bot-generated content dictates what we see. If these “content armies” aren’t pushing audio, they are flooding comment sections to control the narrative. While Geese eventually scrubbed mentions of “narrative campaigns” from their marketing firm’s website following public backlash, other acts are leaning into the “industry plant” label.
The global girl group Katseye, featured in the Netflix docuseries “Pop Star Academy,” is a prime example of corporate-manufactured stardom. Despite the dystopian nature of their creation—designed to sell Erewhon smoothies and hair serums—fans eventually became deeply invested, even defending the group’s music after initially hating tracks like “Gnarly.”
Drawing the Line
Whether it’s the speculation surrounding Manon’s hiatus or the manufactured discourse around indie bands, we are forced to ask: do we actually care that these moments are synthetic? We have yet to establish social norms regarding the difference between necessary marketing and inauthentic growth hacking. Ultimately, it is up to the fans to decide where that line is drawn.
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