This Is What a Music Trade ‘Plant’ Seems to be Like in 2026

For those who’re into rock, chances are high you’ve heard of the band Geese.

The Brooklyn-based band has been receiving crucial acclaim and mainstream attention for fairly a while, with common comparisons to legendary bands like The Strokes. However that they had a meteoric rise in recognition over the previous yr. The band’s fourth studio album, Getting Killed, dropped in late September and was named one of the best of 2025 by the New Yorker in December. They made their musical visitor debut on Saturday Evening Stay in January of this yr and performed Coachella this previous weekend.

Now, a viral Substack article and a subsequent WIRED report have drawn consideration to the truth that the social media buzz round Geese has not been completely natural.

On the middle of the controversy is Chaotic Good Tasks, a comparatively new boutique digital advertising and marketing company that creates user-generated content material (UGC) and different advertising and marketing campaigns for musicians.

“We’re type of finding out the web and TikTok and seeing what’s working organically and making an attempt to recreate it at scale inorganically,” Chaotic Good co-founder Andrew Spelman advised Billboard in an interview final month. “TikTok is fully primarily based round trending audios…an enormous a part of what we’re doing is posting sufficient quantity throughout sufficient accounts with sufficient impressions to attempt to simulate the concept that the tune is trending or shifting or no matter you wish to name it.”

The accounts are run by “a big community of each workers and contractors,” co-founder Jesse Coren mentioned in the identical interview.

“Our workplace is overrun with iPhones,” Spelman mentioned.

One other co-founder of the corporate, Adam Tarsia, confirmed to WIRED on Tuesday that they did certainly engineer a marketing campaign for Geese on TikTok.

Geese are removed from the one band that Chaotic Good works with. The company has run advertising and marketing campaigns for artists like Alex Warren, Zara Larsson, and Sombr, all of whom have shot to international stardom lately, in addition to artists who’re already family names like Tame Impala, Coldplay, Justin Bieber, and Dua Lipa.

However Geese are getting a major a part of the net pushback for this, as a result of they had been already the topic of business plant rumors. The band’s sudden rise in recognition had already led many on-line critics to invest that the web buzz they had been getting was not completely natural, and maybe as a substitute pushed by business backers like labels or advertising and marketing businesses.

It might be improper to single out Chaotic Good as the one firm that pumps out pretend fan content material to spice up the recognition of its purchasers. These social media ways have develop into the secret within the music business, which has had its fair proportion of controversy up to now yr over quite a few different arguably dishonest, alleged practices. For instance, Spotify was hit with a class action lawsuit late final yr, accusing the streamer of “misleading enterprise practices” for its Discovery Mode characteristic, which supplies customized suggestions to customers primarily based on their music style, however lets artists pay their method in. In the meantime, Drake was hit with a category motion lawsuit in January for allegedly utilizing bots to artificially inflate his streaming numbers.

UGC methods are employed by labels and advertising and marketing businesses, huge and small, to create buzz and the phantasm of a fanbase for his or her purchasers within the hope that an actual fanbase will observe. These groups typically have pretend fan accounts that “leak” new music, submit fan edits of trending films and TV exhibits set to the songs of their purchasers, or pay different influencers with sizable followings to make use of the songs in movies or advertisements.

The ways would possibly really feel dishonest and make some followers and smaller artists really feel cheated, maybe. However their pervasiveness proves the facility that the TikTok algorithm holds in our society, and in flip, the affect that the people who find themselves expert at enjoying social media algorithms can wield.

Whereas UGC is booming in music, different industries are catching on. The 2024 presidential election was only one example of how UGC campaigns just like these utilized by the music business have gotten steadily extra prevalent in political campaigns.

With AI-generated content material approaching like a tsunami this yr, count on the fanbase of your latest obsession to be much less natural than ever.