Last weekend, I watched the livestream of Geese’s Coachella set from the comfort of my home, delighted when they busted out their fan-favorite cover of Justin Bieber’s “Baby” in the middle of 3D Country opener “2122” (it’s become a tradition for the band to cover another song, or a part of another song, during “2122”’s breakdown). The “Baby” cover was presumably in honor of Justin Bieber, who was headlining that same night.
That bubbly pop song about young love isn’t all that links Bieber and Geese. These two artists are both clients of the digital marketing agency Chaotic Good. I learned this sometime in the past two weeks, in the same way many did—from a now-viral Substack essay by musician and cultural critic Eliza McLamb. She broke down the main four services that Chaotic Good offers to clients: narrative campaigns, user-generated content, fan pages, and brands and media—all with the goal of generating virality via decentralized, non-marketing-marketing.
Chaotic Good has since wiped their client list and “narrative campaign” section from their website. In the wake of this essay’s virality, the shock and outrage seemed to coalesce not around Chaotic Good or their mission or even their clients en masse—the target of most of this vitriol was Geese frontman Cameron Winter.
On April 14, Wired published an essay by John Semley titled “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop,” in which Semley highlighted the “back-room machinations” responsible for Geese’s success—the “back-room machinations” in question being…a marketing budget from one of the most reputable independent record labels on the planet. If a decent marketing campaign is what passes for a “psyop” these days, all your favorite artists are Contras.
Pop stars like Alex Warren and Sombr are—or at least, at the time McLamb published her essay, were—on Chaotic Good’s roster, but these are major label artists whose reputations in the public eye are already entirely commercial. A contract with a marketing agency responsible for flooding comment sections, running meme pages, and generating faux-viral trends is not incongruous with the public’s perception of these artists. Terms like “indie” and “alternative” mean next to nothing in the streaming age—Sombr’s songs might appear on Spotify playlists with titles like “Indie Vibes,” but in terms of his artistry and career machinations, he is not out of the mainstream by any stretch of the imagination.
Going by the most basic of definitions, Geese and Cameron Winter are both signed to Partisan Records, an independent label, making them “indie” artists. Going beyond this into a more amorphous, “vibes-based” definition: Geese and Cameron Winter’s music generally does not have a poppy or commercial sound. Geese met as kids and spent their teen years playing together in basements. The musical influences they cite are ones that suggest years of deep crate-digging. They had somewhat mainstream breakthroughs with 2025’s Getting Killed and 2024’s Heavy Metal respectively, but prior to that they had been steadily working their way up, touring with critically-established legacy bands like Vampire Weekend and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and releasing their first two albums to respectable acclaim but nowhere near the discourse-dominating success of a record like Getting Killed. In interviews, Winter and his bandmates come off as a ragtag gang of shy, quirky kids. In terms of streaming metrics, their listenership is just shy of 2 million monthly streams—extremely successful by indie standards but nowhere near the Sombrs and Alex Warrens of the world, who boast numbers in the 50 million range.
To the layperson, Geese’s ethos might seem incompatible with the mission of an agency like Chaotic Good. Partnering with an agency whose purpose is to make artists go viral could never be a strike against Sombr or Alex Warren, because authenticity was never a hallmark of their music or public personas (and said music and public personas were never all that interesting to begin with). As Semley himself notes, “there is sometimes a naive hope that ‘indie artists’ should be held to a different—perhaps higher—standard. Nobody minds when major label pop stars do this sort of thing. It’s expected.”
I’d estimate that I get anywhere between one and two hundred music-related PR emails every day, mostly from artists with a fraction of the critical attention and publicity budget as a band like Geese. Aside from the small percentage of these that come from artists reaching out to me directly, every single one of those emails is in my inbox because an artist paid for it to be there. Every press release I get, every mailing list I’m added to, all of it is the result of an artist or their label paying someone to promote their music. Because it is my job to sift through these PR emails and pick which projects to write about, I know that I’m being marketed to. Outreach to the music press is allowed, nay, designed to be overt in its intentions. Outreach that engages with fans directly is an entirely different game. As McLamb wrote in her essay, “SNL performances and favorable Pitchfork reviews don’t move the needle—TikToks about these things do.”
If you’re specializing in direct engagement with fans (as Chaotic Good does), the objective is to market to audiences without them knowing they’re being marketed to—to make it seem like you’re one of them. I spoke with a digital marketing coordinator for a third-party agency similar to Chaotic Good who asked to remain anonymous; we’ll call her Sophia. She has worked on marketing campaigns involving both official and unofficial fan accounts specializing in audience-facing promotion. “If the copywriting sounds like promo, you’ve failed at the job,” Sophia says. In order to get the tone right, Sophia studies other fans’ posting styles.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, I’m running an unofficial fan account on behalf of someone like PinkPantheress or GloRilla,” she explains. “If their team asks me to post about new merch, I can’t just say, ‘PinkPantheress just released new merch out now at [LINK].’ I’d have to react the way a fan would, so instead I’d write something like, ‘omg i neeeeeed that crewneck.’”
Sophia also notes the importance of caution when sourcing assets for content meant to appear fan-made. She points to a Sombr “fan account” that was routinely posting exclusive behind-the-scenes footage “that only somebody from his team would have, not some rando running a fan account in Idaho or wherever.”
The frequency with which artists use these services varies greatly. Geese and other Chaotic Good clients who boast a similar critical caliber and fanbase size—artists like Dijon, Jane Remover, and Oklou—might work with these agencies on one or two campaigns pegged to something like an SNL or Tiny Desk performance, whereas an artist with a bigger budget and audience might have a more all-encompassing approach (Sophia alleges that the in-house publicity team at Atlantic Records runs “no fewer than 30 accounts on Alex Warren’s behalf.”).
For mainstream pop stars, Sophia says that “one account is just simply not enough… you need to flood the algorithm via multiple channels or you’re just not gonna be noticed in the digital ecosystem and your music’s not gonna be picked up. It’s just as important nowadays as running radio campaigns was back in the day.”
Publicity and marketing have been an aspect of the music industry for as long as recorded music has existed. It’s the avenues for these things that have changed. In the present day, sending an artist’s album to a music critic or a radio station is not as impactful a tactic as mass-producing memes, comments, and graphics that mimic the language and aesthetics of fan culture. What’s happened as a result of this—or perhaps vice versa; it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation—is this feedback loop in which fans are posting like marketing coordinators and marketing coordinators are posting like fans. A 17-year-old running a stan account might post about the new Taylor Swift album breaking a streaming record. A 32-year-old marketing coordinator might post that the new Taylor Swift album saved their life.
Something else I’ve noticed about the ever-evolving rhetoric of online fandom: it is no longer enough to dislike a work of music based on its artistic merit; you have to morally justify your distaste. Music you don’t like can never just be stupid or boring or irritating, it has to be problematic. If you dislike an artist, it has to be because they are a bad person harboring some type of societal evil. The Chaotic Good debacle granted those who already disliked Geese’s music a moral high ground—they aren’t just a shitty band that you don’t like, they’re industry plants who bought their success instead of earning it the honest way.
I’m reminded of the all-too-common phenomenon where sexual misconduct allegations surface against a high-profile entertainer and people are quick to chime in that they “never liked [artist] anyway” or “always knew something was up with them,” as if comments like these add anything to the situation other than noise. (One commenter ended an anti-Geese screed with “hope you get cancelled,” which implies that their hatred for this band is so strong that if one of the members were to cause somebody harm, the victim’s hypothetical suffering would be worth it). What ever happened to saying, “I think this sucks,” and moving on?
The backlash toward Geese was already brewing long before these two viral essays. In some ways, it was bound to happen. No artist is truly successful until they’re big enough to have haters. I understand why a band like Geese or a solo artist like Cameron Winter might not be for everyone. I also understand why the success of musicians from a class-privileged background might turn people off, or why finding out that said band’s success isn’t as organic as it once seemed might leave detractors feeling vindicated and fans feeling betrayed.
People want to think they have good taste, and they want to think their taste is above the influence of algorithmic advertising. If someone compliments your shirt, it feels so much cooler to be able to say you found it in some mom and pop thrift store in the middle of nowhere than to admit that you got it off some influencer’s TikTok shop. We want to think of ourselves as curious, discerning consumers, and we should try to be. Go to a show where you don’t recognize any bands on the bill. Close your eyes and stick your hand in the discount bin at your local record store and buy the first CD you pull out. Type some random bullshit into the Soundcloud search bar until something comes up.
I roll my eyes when I read features hailing Geese as the saviors of rock and roll—not because Geese aren’t a great rock band, but because they’re one of many great rock bands. New York’s indie rock scene—the very scene that Geese came out of—is thriving right now, despite the city’s affordability crisis. Many of the bands on the local DIY and indie circuit are ones who spent years playing the same stages as Geese, who are still playing those stages, and who make me believe that rock is anything but dead every time I go to one of their shows. This generation is full of incredible musicians grinding away in obscurity because they lack the resources needed to cut through the algorithmic static.
The reason industry plant discourse gets people so incensed is because it’s a reminder that the entertainment industry was never a meritocracy, and the reason agencies like Chaotic Good work is because people really don’t want to know when they’re being marketed to. I don’t think it’s cool or conducive to good art that musicians are incentivized to strive for virality, but so long as the music itself is good, I don’t begrudge them for using the resources available to them. I wish these resources were available to everyone—scratch that, I wish these resources were entirely unnecessary and no musician ever had to make an Instagram Reel ever again, but that’s just not the reality we’re living in. And, given the choice between Cameron Winter postpostposting every day about the “Love Takes Miles” Challenge (or whatever) versus having his label pay some marketing coordinator to comment variations of “BEST SNL PERFORMANCE EVER” from 12 different burner accounts, I’d pick the latter any day.
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
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