The Goose Controversy

If you are even marginally online, you have seen the recent discourse about promotions company Chaotic Good Projects and their podcast episode where they own up to their tactics of manipulating TikTok and other social networks to make their campaigns look like real organic growth. This sums up their tactics nicely:

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

That's from a WIRED article called "The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop." Meaning, they aren't really popular, the Internet was just manipulated in a way to make you think they were popular.

There has been much discourse about this. A lot if worth reading. This Maximum Exposure Inc piece has some nice insights into what Chaotic Good is doing:

What’s being shaped is not the audience directly, but the atmosphere in which the audience encounters something, the environment that determines whether it appears meaningful, relevant, or real.

The rest of the post goes into "Angry Music Fan Yells at Cloud" territory, which I find personally tiresome, but it does make some excellent insights earlier.

Of course, Garbage Day spoke on this as well and, turns out, Chaotic Good is probably not as good at all that manipulation that they claim to be so great at, especially when it comes to the band Geese.

There is a link between music streaming platforms and social content, yes, but it goes in the opposite direction. A big artist releases an album on Spotify, Spotify puts it in playlists, and that artist grows on Instagram and TikTok. It’s almost never the other way around. And this is actually true for almost every form of digital media right now.

...we know that Geese didn’t get big from TikTok. Major outlets like Rolling Stone and The New York Times were writing about them all the way back in 2021! They’ve had an extremely traditional career actually.

So, what is real? Are comments and posts and "online discourse" actually being effectively manipulated by a promotions company? Is that manipulation trickling out of social media and into real world opinion? I'd say yes to both but probably not to the degree that anyone wants you to believe.

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Coincidentally, back in early March there was an episode of Darknet Diaries called "Melody Fraud" in which the guest talks at length about how his promotions company manipulated the Internet for musicians back in the late 90s & early aughts. Maybe there's some solace in the idea that whatever manipulation tactics are happening in 2026 aren't some new aggressive behavior, it's the same ole game that's been happening for a long time.