Fake Fans: Inside the digital marketing agency that creates your music taste

Fake Fans

into the digital marketing agency that creates your music taste

Edit 4/2: One day after this piece went up, Chaotic Good made significant changes to their website — including pulling the “Narrative Campaign” section completely. Some of the artists I write about here no longer feature on the website, though it is not clear if they are still clients of Chaotic Good (my suspicion is that they are, and that their managements are removing public associations with the company). That being said, some of the examples I cited here can no longer be traced back to their website, but feel free to use the waybackmachine or similar to check my work!

If they had it their way, music business executives would rather not deal with the fans at all.

Fans are a complicated, messy, unpredictable group. Sometimes they love a record, sometimes they hate it. Sometimes they love the single and hate the record. Sometimes they love the record and hate the single. They’re teenage girls, oldhead uncles, Gwenyth Paltrow, and the guy checking your groceries out at the Safeway. Their communities are niche and complex, their tastes formed not only by the artists they listen to but by the opinions of other fans. As an executive, you can inflate the charts, you can buy streams. You can buy vinyl (though who even cares about that). You can even pay people to crowd the shows once or twice. But for any art worth your investment, you will eventually need real people to reliably, measureably, and genuinely care about it.

In the dream world of an executive, fandom is something like a parasitic disease — contagious through mere exposure, trafficking quickly between hosts with immediate contact and little to no external intervention. This way, the executive needs only to create a Patient Zero and watch the snowball gather material. The disease would spread seamlessly, easily. It would be viral.

Last week, I came across a Billboard interview with the founders of Chaotic Good Projects, a digital marketing agency that promises to create virality by, among other things, manufacturing hundreds of fake fan accounts for musicians.

Having been a working musician for the better part of the last decade, this was not particularly surprising to me. Commercial music exists for a reason (it is widely liked and extremely profitable), and it is no secret that there is a gigantic machine that is not only behind our biggest stars, but playing a part in breaking the new mainstream. There are kinds of music that are compatible with TikTok trends, and others that rely on a broader context, a less immediate delivery. Distinguished taste is something people pride themselves on — the idea that they have some resistance left still, that they don’t have to listen to the Alex Warrens of the Sombrs of the world simply because the algorithm has offered its teat to suck.

Alex Warren and Sombr are, to no one’s surprise, clients of Chaotic Good Projects. These two are part of the new mainstream broken primarily by algorithmic social media platforms, though Chaotic Good’s client list also includes more established pop giants like Dua Lipa, Shawn Mendes, and Justin Bieber. The careers of these people, while obviously influential in my industry, are not really what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the people who made it without capitulating completely to commercial demands, whose personas don’t eclipse their work. People who are making stuff that’s simultaneously viable enough to be profitable and still uncompromising on a vision. I’m interested in the real rock stars, if we have any left.

The first time I heard Cameron Winter’s “Love Takes Miles,” I probably heard it one hundred times in a row. I had found it a week after its release and became immediately convinced that I was one of the few people in the world who knew about this perfect, beautiful little secret. At the time, the song had just under a million streams, and I was obsessed with showing it to everyone. Everyone soon caught on. The next year, it was the summer of “Love Takes Miles.” I played it in rental cars in Los Angeles and off my phone speakers in the most remote parts of Chimney Rock, North Carolina. The rest of that record was a similar revelation for me. I had discovered some kind of magic.

Though, I can’t remember exactly how I discovered it. I didn’t hear about the song from a friend or a music blog, and can’t recall a particular memory — only that of seeing the title somewhere on my phone and searching it up on Spotify. How I came to know the song is almost irrelevant information at this point, eclipsed completely by the experience of loving the song on my own terms, creating my own memories with it. The song just came to me, from somewhere, populating seamlessly in a stream of consciousness. A stream of consciousness, otherwise known as an algorithm.

“Loves Takes Miles” was worked as a part of a “narrative campaign” by Chaotic Good Projects. A “narrative campaign” is one of four kinds of services the agency offers — the others being “UGC” (which stands for user-generated content), “Fanpage,” and “Brands and Media.” According to the agency’s website, they also worked narrative and UGC campaigns for Geese’s record “Getting Killed.”

When I discovered that the same media apparatus propping up Sombr and Alex Warren (the term propping up here is used intentionally — to me, there is almost nothing compelling about these artists aside from their aggressive social campaign) was also boosting Cameron Winter and Geese, I was shocked. I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass-market, commercial pop — secretly, also, that this was the only kind of music such marketing would work for.

Alternative music used to mean just that — an alternative to the mainstream — something that couldn’t simply be adopted by everyone else through pure exposure, through virality. There are certainly arguments to be made about the mass appeal of a band like Geese, but no one in good faith could compare them to the commercial pop stars that populate Chaotic Good’s roster.

But the roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect (and, apologies to the internet sensations, including people I consider to be genuinely great musicians). Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.

I have no doubt that these artists could have ascended without the assistance of Chaotic Good because they are great musicians, and many people enjoy their music. I believe that this could have happened in the same way that I believe my friends in bands who play at bars could be the biggest musicians in the world if the industry were willing to facilitate their exposure. Much is said about hundreds of thousands of AI songs being uploaded to streaming services every day. Not enough is said about the many bands that are playing to no one, so many bands that could be huge if given the opportunity to be heard.

But the industry has changed. “Being heard” is not just about putting out music or even promoting it. The gatekeepers hardly matter anymore. SNL performances and favorable Pitchfork reviews don’t move the needle — TikToks *about *those things do (Chaotic Good ran a UGC campaign specifically to promote Oklou’s Tiny Desk performance). So, in this new landscape, is creating hundreds of fake accounts just par for the course of being a good publicist?

Though their website gives next-to-no details aside from who their clients are, Chaotic Good’s UGC (user-generated content) campaigns seem self-explanatory. Chaotic Good is paid to create accounts that generate content and simulate trends, which will ideally result in organic users generating content to further the trends themselves. Founders Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman know that the internet is highly suggestible, which also happens to be the ethos of their narrative campaigns.