It’s nothing new for artists to be labelled industry plants, but the recent allegations that Gen Z rock band Geese are a ‘psy-op’ feels different. Not only does the term imply a level of control more insidious than the major-label, industry backing that music fans have grown familiar with, but it also centres on perhaps the single most beloved band to come out in recent years. Geese had been proclaimed the voice of a generation, harking back to an analogue era of music before the reign of social media. Was that all a lie? 

The allegations originated in a Billboard interview with digital marketing company Chaotic Good published last month, in which they bragged about their ability to “make impressions on anything” through a fleet of agency-run fan pages and advanced algorithmic manipulation. Then came a Substack post written by musician Eliza McLamb, who discovered that Chaotic Good’s website listed Geese, Oklou and Mk.gee as among their many clients (Chaotic Good has allegedly since purged their website) and described their unparalleled ability to engineer artist success as “unfair.” The controversy finally hit the mainstream when, two days ago (April 14) Wired ran an article titled: “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop”. Geese-gate had begun.

Fake Fans by eliza mclamb

into the digital marketing agency that creates your music taste

Read on Substack

Fans weren’t happy – not with Chaotic Goods’ practices, but rather with the insinuation that their love for Geese was anything other than genuine. “Pathetic ‘journalism’,” “clickbait,” and “fake news,” are just some of the reactions to the Wired article that were shared with me over DM. Their anger is understandable: Geese’s music has managed to captivate young people in a way that rock bands have failed to do for years, and no amount of marketing voodoo can fully account for that. “I think that Geese make incredible music and would have likely had some level of success soon anyway,” journalist and Geese fan Sasha Mills tells me. “I attended their London show, and it had the best energy of any large-scale gig I’d been to in years. For me, that’s enough!” 

Without a doubt, Geese’s music is widely beloved. “You can only artificially platform an artist so much if the music isn’t actually good,” record label marketing manager Jarvis Cooper* explains. “It’s unfair that Geese have been scapegoated here because literally every single artist is using the techniques mentioned in the Wired article. That’s just how the industry works. Nine times out of ten, when you click on a TikTok and hear an artist’s sound being used, or follow a fan page, that’s actually the label doing it.” Looking at the Wikipedia page for the term ‘industry plant’ seems to confirm Cooper’s experience – it reads like a Hall of Fame of ‘who the fuck is that?’, with acts like The Tramp Stamps and Raury receiving industry plant allegations in the early 2010s before fading into relative obscurity. Clearly, Geese deserve some credit.

Literally every single artist is using the techniques mentioned in the Wired article. That’s just how the industry works.

– Jarvis Cooper* record label marketing manager

Given that artists now need to compete for social media attention whether they like it or not, writer Laura Molloy suggests that hiring marketing agencies to do the dirty work might not actually be such a bad idea. “The music that Geese are making is intertwined with the idea of the artist as a mysterious, untouchable entity, so how do you maintain that in an industry where you have to be big on social media and get people’s attention?” she asks. “I don’t think [Geese using a marketing agency] is something we should necessarily be upset about, because the artist isn’t forced into being a social media personality by themselves. I do think some of the mystique around them would’ve been lost if they had taken the traditional social media route of trying to dance TikTok or whatever.”

One glaring issue with this new, social media-impressions-fuelled music industry is privilege. “I feel like it’s more fucked up for people of colour and people who come from poverty,” says London-based alt-pop artist Hornet, pointing to how the significant resources needed to replicate a Geese-level marketing campaign amount to an access barrier for independent and working-class artists. But it also raises the question of free will. While Cooper insists that these practices long predate the social media age – “15 years ago it was PRs taking radio DJs and journalists out to dinner to secure coverage” – there does seem to be something more insidious about the sorts of practices that Chaotic Good offers. It’s telling, for example, that Wired chose the word ‘psy-op’ over the hitherto standard criticism against rising artists: ‘industry plant’. It speaks to an intensification of manipulation, an extra layer of duplicity in seemingly independent fan pages secretly being run by marketing agencies. 

For many, reading the recent articles about Chaotic Good spirals into a questioning of reality that is rapidly becoming second-nature in the internet age: Did I really like Geese? Did anyone really like Geese? Which other artists am I being force-fed? Even the Chaotic Good interview with Billboard raises some eyebrows: is this online shitstorm actually just another example of their industry-leading narrative manipulation? Was that the real psy-op? After all, no one had even heard of Chaotic Good five days ago. 

Watching the endless discourse play out online this week, I was reminded of a particular scene in Adam Curtis’ 2016 documentary epic Hypernormalisation, in which he details the centrality of media manipulation to Vladimir Putin’s ironclad rule over Russia. In the film, Curtis describes how ‘political technologist’ and Putin aide Vladislav Surkov applied the principles of live theatre to governance, misdirecting the public through the funding of both anti-fascist and Neo-Nazi organisations, and even political parties that were opposed to Putin. Then, Surkov made it known that he was doing so. Putin’s government “undermined people’s perception of the world so that they are never sure what is really happening,” Curtis narrates. “Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere, hidden behind a stage, exercised without anyone seeing it.” Even if it was unintentional, the parallels with Geese-gate are uncanny: while internet users and media publications debated the integrity of Geese’s rise, Chaotic Good’s brand power was being consolidated in plain sight.

This search for reality in a world of mirrors and marketing agencies formed a key focus of McLamb’s Substack post at the start of this month. In it, she describes feeling disappointment with Geese being “propped up” by the aggressive marketing campaigns usually reserved for the “Alex Warrens [and] the Sombrs of this world” and proceeds to question what success really looks like if streams and fanpages can be bought. “I suspect that the more ubiquitous [Chaotic Good’s] service becomes, the more bands will resist it, pulling back from streaming and socials altogether in favour of embracing hyper-local, scene-based methods of growth,” she writes in the post’s concluding paragraphs, pointing to one potential route out of this strange, marketing-led world.

At the heart of this debate isn’t whether Geese deserve to be successful, but rather how comfortable people are with being exploited in order to get them there. “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation,” Chaotic Good (whose name itself suggests worthwhile ends justifying messy means) co-founder Jesse Coren told Billboard last month. This, at least, appears true, and fans now need to decide whether it’s worth being manipulated to discover good music.

* name has been changed.