Brooklyn indie rockers Geese shot to the heights of rock and roll fame at the end of 2025. Their fourth album Getting Killed, was released in late September and dominated the year’s top 10 lists. Their fall tour sold out almost everywhere. The collective buzz earned them slots on Saturday Night Live and at Coachella and made the band (and frontman Cameron Winter, who has his own solo career) something close to a household name—at least in households where polyrhythmic art rock is a topic of conversation. The Guardian’s review of the new record called Geese “the new saviors of rock ’n’ roll.”
Their explosion onto the scene, seemingly out of nowhere, led to an inevitable backlash. Haters called them a “psyop.” Some questioned their sudden-seeming rise to superstardom, calling them “an industry plant.” Others, while acknowledging their talent, attributed their fame to savvy marketing. Certainly, when a band blows up so quickly, it can seem inorganic, and a bit weird. When a band moves from the edges of the conversation to smack in the center, it can raise suspicions that its darling status was attributable to some sort of back-room machinations rather than a rare combination of talent, hard work, and a bit of good luck.
Now, those paranoid-seeming suspicions have been proven true—sort of.
In late March, the cofounders of the digital marketing company Chaotic Good Projects—who provide, per its Instagram, “digital experiments and musical mayhem”—appeared on Billboard’s On The Record podcast. In the episode (recorded live at South by Southwest) Chaotic Good’s Andrew Spelman and Jesse Coren explained how their viral marketing methods work.
Essentially, the firm creates networks of social media pages (typically on TikTok) and uses them to drive the band’s music into the recommendation algorithm. Songs are dropped into the backgrounds of videos. Live clips are shared. Sometimes, burner accounts, comments, and whole ecosystems of interactions can be fabricated out of digital cloth, stoking—and in some cases, completely manufacturing—discourse around an artist. These ginned-up interactions push the songs and the discussion about them higher up a platform’s algorithmic rankings. And social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube are, increasingly, where (real) fans discover new music.
“We can drive impressions on anything at this point,” Spelman told Billboard. “We know how to go viral. We have thousands of pages.” Spelman has dubbed the process “trend simulation.” And the campaigns themselves are referred to by Chaotic Good as “narrative” or UGC (for “user-generated content”) campaigns.
Now Chaotic Good cofounder Adam Tarsia confirms to WIRED that his company engineered campaigns for both Geese and Cameron Winter. “We helped distribute clips of them performing and doing some interviews on TikTok,” Tarsia says via email, speaking on behalf of Chaotic Good. “I understand that ‘industry plant’ discourse is inevitable, but we’ve had the pleasure of being Geese fans since their 2021 project Projector,” which, he notes, was released four full years before his agency launched.
The long-bubbling suspicions about the band’s rise boiled over the first week of April. A viral Substack post by singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb traced the connection between Geese and Chaotic Good and mulled the fuzzy ethics of such marketing. As McLamb summed up the model: “If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome.”
“I wasn't expecting the piece to be as widely shared as it was, and I was happy to see a conversation get started around the whole thing,” McLamb, who is currently on tour supporting her 2025 album Good Story, says of her post, titled “Fake Fans.”
“I've been wary of people referring to it in any way as a ‘hit piece’ or even particularly investigative. I just listened to an interview and poked around a website. The most compelling part to me in many ways was how plainly all these tactics were discussed, even as the tactics themselves succeed when operating somewhat out of view.”
The situation got a little sketchier when, shortly after McLamb’s post started spreading in music biz circles, Chaotic Good wiped mentions of specific artists—including Geese and Cameron Winter—from its website. This, too, the company freely admits. The team also removed reference to “narrative campaigns.”
“We took things down from the site so our artist partners don't get wrapped up in false accusations or misconceptions about how their music was discovered,” Tarsia says. “Much of the discourse around ‘narrative campaigns’ we were seeing online was not accurate to how they actually function. In practice, narrative campaigns mostly consist of consulting on digital PR strategy.”
Partisan Records, the label behind both Getting Killed and Winter's solo debut, did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s an open secret in the music industry that all the numbers—play counts, followers, stats—are fake or at least obfuscated. Last year, Drake was hit with a lawsuit claiming that a large proportion of the rapper’s Spotify streams were “inauthentic and appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of bot accounts.” Bots and “streaming farms” have become a marketing expense.
For an industry that used to ply radio DJs with steak dinners, backstage passes, and lines of blow in exchange for airtime, it’s business as usual. Among some fans, 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. But bands who trade in hard-earned credibility can take a hit.
As Darren Hemmings, author of the popular industry insider newsletter Network Notes, and founder of the UK marketing agency Motive Unknown, recently put it in a post: “Reputational damage is the toughest thing to shake. In art, being derided as fake or (the old classic) an ‘industry plant’ can see your credibility disappear at an alarming pace.”
“I do think people have a needless purity about artists who aren't on major labels, or even artists who seem counterculture in any way,” McLamb says. “This kind of marketing seems to be what it takes to cut through the algorithmic noise.”
Chaotic Good stops short of admitting it was using “fake fan” accounts, or bots, to drive buzz around Geese’s Getting Killed and Winter’s 2024 record, Heavy Metal. The accounts driving the discourse are, in a sense, “genuine”—bespoke, engineered, and overseen directly by the in-house PR team, working from their smartphones. Tarsia insists that Chaotic Good’s teams “don’t ever use any strategies that involve the artificial inflation of streaming or social media numbers.”
Geese has “worked hard building a real grassroots community to achieve all their recent success,” Tarsia says. “We’re protective and aware of the relationship between fan community and artist and want to aid that connection, not force it. We are vehemently opposed to the use of bot farms, and our team solely consists of genuine music fans.”
The idea of a PR firm creating dozens of social media accounts to push new music or artists may seem slightly sinister, in part because the very idea of an account arguably presumes some sort of independent consciousness behind it. But is it really any different, in essence, than dozens of music blogs republishing the same press releases pushing that same music and those same bands? These tactics follow a golden rule of so much online discourse, which another of Chaotic Good’s founding partners summed up in that Billboard interview: “Everything on the internet is fake.”
For her part, McLamb says that these sorts of new, extremely online marketing campaigns are “no more or less nefarious than anything else that's been going on in the music business since the dawn of time.” Asked if she would ever consent to these sorts of trend-simulating marketing tactics promoting her own music, McLamb is unequivocal: “I would absolutely take part in a narrative or UGC campaign.”
