How these two marketers manipulate your music taste

0:15You are listening to a band called Geese. This is their track Cobra and it's one of their most popular songs. It's made Geese one of the most popular new indie bands. They are insanely popular Over 1.5 million people listen to Geese each month on Spotify. But how do Geese become so popular? I'm not the first to ask this question.

0:40Andrew Spelman: How do songs really go viral? That's Kirsten Robinson, a senior music business correspondent at Billboard. Sure, it could be something as simple as a single singing video posted to TikTok that just totally explodes. But now trying to engineer virality has become a big business in the industry. That clip is from a podcast episode that Billboard published themselves. It's called The Secrets to Song Virality. Normally, shows like this would get a decent listenership from those inside the music industry. But this podcast, it was heard by many thousands more. It went viral because the guests on the show revealed something that shocked most music fans.

1:20Andrew Spelman: Perhaps no one knows more about how modern songs go viral than my guests today, Jesse Corrin and Andrew Spellman, two of the co-founders of Chaotic Good. These are some of the music industry's go-to digital marketers. From Geese to Zara Larson, Travis Scott and Alex Warren, the Chaotic Good team has had a hand in making sure new songs reach listeners. But how do Chaotic Good make sure that new songs reach listeners? Well, they manufacture fandom. We always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments, which, you know, is a reminder to us of like, we can help. And I don't know if this will make anyone feel better, but we can, you know, a lot of what we do on sort of the narrative side will be, you know, controlling the discourse.

2:06They control the discourse. Today on Nudge, I explain how. I cover how some of the world's biggest bands shift opinion through manufactured engagement, how all of us are swayed by the opinions of others, and what this means for bands, for brands, and for politicians. All of that, coming up. Most businesses have an overwhelming amount of data. It's typically scattered across the business in different tools with different teams but because it's scattered no one can use it that is where HubSpot come in HubSpot connects it all every interaction every support ticket every conversation and they connect it into one platform that every team can work from because when you know more you grow more check out HubSpot.com the agentic customer platform for growing businesses To explain why this is a big deal in the music world, we have to start by explaining quite how popular chaotic goods clients have become.

3:12Let's start with Geese.

3:14Andrew Spelman: Geese basically are a band from New York, a bunch of friends who grew up together, went to high school together. That's freelance music journalist Shad DeSouza talking about Geese on the Guardian's Today in Focus podcast. And who make this quite like jammy, kind of bluesy rock.

3:38Andrew Spelman: But you know, it's super hooky. They released a couple of albums a few years back. And then last year, they released their third album, Getting Killed. And it was just this huge sensation that seemed like suddenly, overnight, everyone was talking about Geese. This is their album. It's called Getting Killed. Here with the song Taxes Geese. A few months before that, their frontman Cameron Winter had released an almost Rufus Wainwright-esque album of kind of piano folk songs.

4:21Andrew Spelman: And then, you know, over the course of 2025, both Geese and Cam Winter both kind of like blew up. We hear this about bands a lot. They blew up. They went viral. Fans went mad. They've topped the charts. But I've perhaps naively always assumed that to get big, these musicians must have created great music. Great music that fans loved and shared, which propelled that band into bigger and bigger fandom. But back in March 2026 at South by Southwest, a musical and tech industry festival, Billboard hosted this podcast that made me question those views. How do songs go viral today in this incredibly crowded landscape?

5:03Andrew Spelman: I'm joined here by Jesse Corrin and Andrew Spellman. They are the founders of Chaotic Good, which is a digital agency used by so many people. It's hard to count. But a lot of labels hire them, artists, managers, all in the service of breaking their songs online. The Chaotic Good founders walked through exactly how they make bands popular. The core principles of what we do to make a song go viral, I think what we've seen the progression be and what we've done at Chaotic Good is kind of really think through what it means for a feed to be algorithmic. And that really, really changes what your approach should be.

5:37Andrew Spelman: So it's a lot more volume. It's a lot more thinking about niches. And it's a lot more kind of like hand-to-hand combat. More volume, more niches, and a lot more hand-to-hand combat. Later on, Andrew, the co-founder, explained what he meant by this. We are kind of studying the internet and TikTok and seeing what's working organically and then trying to recreate it at scale inorganically. In other words, they look at real virality, love and fandom, and then they try and recreate that. Sometimes artists get lucky, they post a song and it goes viral. And so then we have a song that isn't naturally going viral.

6:09Andrew Spelman: We apply that to it. And so we say we're kind of simulating a trend. They simulate trends and they do so with fake fans. Interesting. Wait, so like how do you run all of these accounts? Do you just have a bunch of cell phones somewhere? Yeah, pretty much. We have a large network of both employees and contractors and people in our network and a lot of phones. We have a rapid Verizon at this point. We are like a VIP customer of them and our office is overrun with iPhones. Our partner Adam has this theory about which iPhone is best. It gets deep very fast. This is not one or two accounts posting about a couple of bands.

6:49It's a huge network.

6:51Andrew Spelman: You run or have a network of a bunch of different accounts that are meme accounts or sports clips or truck videos or whatever these types of accounts are. And then you can plug the song into those so it creates more of a groundswell effect rather than coming from the top down. Is that correct? That's correct. And there's a very specific reason why this works on TikTok. And so a big part of what we are doing is posting enough volume across enough accounts with enough impressions to try to simulate the idea that the song is trending or moving or whatever you want to call it. Chaotic Good post enough fake admiration to simulate the idea that the song is trending.

7:32Andrew Spelman: All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments. A lot of what we do on sort of the narrative side will be, you know, controlling the discourse. and so you know I think most people see a video or see something about you know an album that came out and it's like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven't heard the whole album so it's really important for us to make sure that we are ahead of it and controlling that narrative and making sure it's in the direction that we want. So let's take a look at a post on Geese's TikTok account from March 9th right before this chaotic good podcast went live.

8:05It's a clip of them performing this song Taxes live and there There are 35 comments. The top comment reads, this band is going to be huge, explanation mark. It has 97 likes. There's more. This, this right here is everything. That's another comment. Another one. I cried during this, by the way. Another comment. I love geese. Another comment. Dream. Remember Chaotic Good tried to control the narrative in the TikTok comments. There are 35 comments on this video. So you might wonder how many accounts can Chaotic Good use to control the narrative? Is it five? Is it 10? Is it 50? No, it's much, much more.

8:47Andrew Spelman: You know, we can derive impressions on anything. At this point, we know how to go viral. We have thousands of pages. They have thousands of account pages, thousands of pages they can use to shift opinion. And they do this for hundreds of bands. I mean, you guys have run campaigns for all sorts of artists. I was looking through your Instagram. You have artists on there like Coldplay and Zara Larson and Childish Gambino. Could you walk me through an example of what are these campaigns working and why you think it works so well? Maybe Childish Gambino? Yeah, Childish Gambino is a fun one. Adam, who is one of our partners in the company who we mentioned.

9:24Andrew Spelman: And so he just started training his friends, his brothers, his brother's friends, and built this kind of like army of people to post on TikTok. and the song started going crazy. That's one of the most fun parts is like, we'll do whatever it takes, honestly. They build an army of fake fans to simulate fandom. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Phil, this will be obvious. It will be obvious when I see someone promoting something inorganically. If a TikTok video popped up on my phone promoting geese, I would know if it was from a fake fan. Well, I'm not sure you would. Because Kristen, the Billboard senior music correspondent, well, she can't tell herself.

10:07Andrew Spelman: I can't tell you probably how many of these accounts I fell for not knowing they were all thought about and manipulated in a way. So for the marketers listening, let us break down the actual tactics they are using here. First, they use their network of thousands of fake accounts to create viral videos using the songs. Second, they flood the comments of real videos and real posts with fake posts about how much those accounts love the band. I think like in the past, let's say like a label and a management team do a great job. They get their artists on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J or something like that.

10:42Andrew Spelman: They post it and then they kind of wait for the comments. This was a terrible cover choice. Voice sounds terrible. All those sorts of things. You know, what we do at Chaotic and with our management clients is, you know, the second the SNL drops at midnight, You should post 100 times saying that was the best performance of the year. The question is, how do you do that at scale? And so it takes a lot of work and infrastructure. But I think controlling the narrative is really, really important. The second a post goes live, they post hundreds of fake, positive comments to control the narrative. You know, if you have the infrastructure in place, like when we started to do this, the moment the tour goes on sale, you should post 100 times across many TikTok accounts, driving it, pushing narratives, talking about how great they are live.

11:22Fake accounts posting fake opinions thousands and thousands of times. But it's not just fake fandom and fake comments. Chaotic Good also pride itself on creating what they call new narratives.

11:36Andrew Spelman: So now we focus a lot on narratives and discourse online. And so it's not always even song specific. It could be, you know, a little bit more about an artist campaign or somebody who worked with another artist. or, you know, we had somebody we work with who produced a big pop record. And so it became about how do we get that narrative out there ahead of their record that they were putting out. Here's Shard de Souza explaining how Chaotic Good builds these new narratives. You know, these ones have the kind of vaguest boundaries, I'd say. But essentially, they go to creators and say, oh, we're trying to spread a narrative that this artist is a generational songwriter or you're essentially paying a bunch of creators to say they love this thing or, you know, one of the big UK agencies that does this is called Your Culture and their kind of main bag, I guess, is sending a bunch of content creators to a live show to capture content from that and, you know, sharing it online and being like, oh my God, I just happened to see Alex Warren's surprise set in the tube station just now.

12:53I'd recommend googling this video which is playing right now. It's titled Alex Warren, live at Warren Tube Station. It looks very organic, very real. Before working on this episode, I would have thought that the fans singing along, you can hear in the background, I would have thought they were all genuine, that his songs were widely loved and there just happened to be all these fans in London for this surprise set. But if you look closer at the video, you start to realise something. The vast majority of people in this video that you can see in the crowd, well they're filming him. They are recording, they're probably creating content.

13:30And then if you look closer, you realise that all the people who are singing along, well they're the people who are filming. The only people who aren't singing are the people who aren't filming. And then you start to realise that this looks quite manufactured. They invite content creators to go along and they know that they have to sing along to the song because that mimics real fandom. But the actual Londoners, the actual commuters, they're not singing. They're not singing. They might be enjoying it, but they're not faking their fandom. Now, here's a really interesting point. I would have thought this type of fake fandom would be extremely expensive, that it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.

14:11But I was wrong. Here's Shard explaining how chaotic good works.

14:16Andrew Spelman: Essentially, it's a bunch of kids fresh out of college, posting hype about your artists, should you choose to pay them, you know, about 2000 US a month. And like chaotic good isn't the only agency that does this, you know, I heard of at least five, but I think there are many, many more based on what I've heard. It's not a phenomenon that starts and ends with chaotic good. And a lot of labels, both indie and major alike, do this in-house now as well. It's very cheap. Just$2 ,000 a month. And it's commonplace. Multiple agencies do it. Labels do it in-house. And to be honest, the brazen way that the chaotic good founders spoke about this show just how widespread this is.

15:01They don't seem conflicted or ashamed by this fake promotion at all. It is normal to them. But it's not normal to many fans, because many fans since hearing about this practice have been outraged.

15:15Andrew Spelman: And so a couple of people on Reddit and also a sub-stacker named Eliza McLam, who's a musician, saw that podcast and dug around a bit and saw that Geese and Cameron Winter, as well as a bunch of, I would say, the biggest breakout artists of 2025, you know, including OK Lou, who's like a French kind of underground electronic singer, McGee, who obviously had a big hand in Justin Bieber's last album, and Dijon, who also had a big record last year and also works with Bieber. A bunch of kind of the biggest success stories of last year were all clients of Chaotic Good. So after that was kind of revealed, all hell kind of broke loose.

15:56Andrew Spelman: half of your favorite artist fans are fake uh-oh guys geese is confirmed in industry playing at the fanfare if 100 people think your song sucks chaotic good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome

16:18I've worked in marketing for the past decade. I've helped hundreds of companies grow online. I've even worked at a social media scheduling company which helped thousands of brands post on social. But even I'm shocked by the clear and obvious manipulation these agencies are peddling. and I think it's important to cover because there is very good evidence that this type of fake promotion really does work. It really does make people more likely to listen to the songs and more likely to love the songs as well. And what's worse is that it goes well beyond music. After the break, we'll cover the psychology behind fake fandom and whether or not this practice is limited to the music industry.

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17:38The Ross Simmons Show is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. I've been following Ross for a while. His podcast is great. And an episode I'd highly recommend is called Mastering Time, Prioritization Over Productivity. He gives some really well thought out tips on how to prioritize your time, including something I care a lot about, which is how a small percentage of your efforts can drive the majority of your results. So go and listen to The Ross Simmons Show wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. So far we've covered how Chaotic Good use fake fan accounts to drum up engagement in their clients.

18:18Technically, this practice isn't new. Famously, Frank Sinatra's publicist, George Evans, paid fans to scream at Sinatra's early concerts. Evans would audition young girls to find who could sing the loudest and paid them$5 each to sit at strategic locations in the audience to whip up excitement. $5 back in 1944, well that was not cheap. Today that is the equivalent of paying someone$94. To fill the first two front rows of one gig for one night, Evans would have been paying the equivalent today of$20 ,000. And yet now, today, for just$2 ,000, you can get a monthly retainer with Chaotic Good and they produce fake engagement on all of your songs across thousands and thousands of accounts every single day.

19:08But I imagine some of you listening still have some doubts. I imagine you still question if the practices of Chaotic Good use are really that bad. I think there are three obvious counterpoints to all of this. The first is a clear one. Many of you listening will probably think that people make independent choices. Fake engagement will not shift opinion, we have free will. Well we'll counter that first but second I think many of you think that music preference is purely intrinsic. It is not driven by the actions of others. What you love is purely down to you. And the third counterpoint is that even if fake fandom works it hardly matters, it's just music.

19:47Well let's cover each of those one by one starting with point number one. People make independent choices and fake fan engagement won't change opinion. This one is really easy to debunk. In 2013, Muchnick, Arroll and Taylor published a paper called Social Influence Bias, a randomised experiment. They partnered with a Reddit-style news aggregation site where users could upvote or downvote comments. Over five months, they randomly altered the upvotes or downvotes of 100 ,000 different comments. A third were given one fake upvote, another third were given one fake downvote, and the final third had no manipulation.

20:29Users had no idea this was happening, and the comments that they upvoted or downvoted or left were viewed 10 million times and subsequently rated by 300 ,000 users. The upvotes and downvotes were totally random, which means the difference in outcomes can only be explained by the initial fake vote, not the comment's quality. And their findings are incredible, but they are not surprising. One, artificial upvote increased the probability that the first real viewer would also upvote by 32%. Crucially, nobody corrected it downwards, so the bias compounds over time, resulting in final scores that were 25 % higher on average than the control comments.

21:15Upvoted comments were also 30 % more likely to reach a score of 10 upvotes or above. So these comments online got a 25 % boost in their score following just one fake upvote. Chaotic Good aren't giving their bands a single upvote. They're posting hundreds of positive comments the second the band's content goes live.

21:39Andrew Spelman: You know, what we do at Chaotic and with our management clients is, you know, the second the SNL drops at midnight, you should post 100 times saying that was the best performance of the year. Fake engagement does influence popularity. That is clear from that 2013 study. But perhaps you're not convinced that it can influence musical preference. Perhaps you think that our love of music comes from a deep intrinsic affinity, not from social proof. Well, that's unlikely. In 2006, Duncan Watts published a study titled The Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market. For this experiment, Watts and his two co-authors built an artificial music market online.

22:16They recruited 14 ,341 participants to listen to and download songs from 48 completely unknown bands. Participants were split into two conditions. Half were in the independent condition. They could see the band names, the song titles, listen and rate the songs 1 to 5 stars, and then they could decide whether to download. That is it. They would not see any information about what other users did. The other half were in the social influence condition. These people had the same setup, but they could also see how many times each song had already been downloaded by other people. They could see the actions of the crowd.

22:59Now, if musical preference was purely intrinsic and unaffected by the preferences of others, then the top song should be the same in both groups. Seeing how other people rate the songs shouldn't change the ratings. But it does. People were far more likely to upvote songs that already started to be popular. So in the social influence condition, the top songs were very different from those in the independent condition. But here's where it gets really interesting. Because the researchers split the social influence condition into eight different worlds, eight different populations. What they found was that the most popular song in world one was drastically different from the most popular song in world two.

23:39The most popular song in World 3 was different to World 4 and so on and so on. The same songs, given to similar groups of people, produced wildly different winners, depending on nothing more than which songs happened to get upvoted first. Initial popularity fuelled future popularity, which is exactly why Chaotic Good flood the comments of new posts with fake positivity.

24:04Andrew Spelman: And built this kind of like army of people to post on TikTok and the song started going crazy. So we've proven that we're swayed by the crowd. We've proven that song preferences are influenced by the masses. But perhaps you're thinking, well, Phil, this doesn't really matter. It's just music after all. But is it just music? Yeah, I mean, OK, what would you say to someone who's like, I'm freaked out by the fact that there's so much going on online that I don't know about? How do you guys feel about those who might hear about this kind of campaign and just be like, what? Are you manipulating my feed?

24:42Andrew Spelman: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is, you know, manipulation, I guess. And I think Andrew would always say, like, everything on the internet is fake. This isn't just music. If indie bands are bothering to go to this level of manipulation to shift opinion, imagine what intercontinental brands are doing. Imagine what million-dollar budget TV shows and movies are doing. Imagine what political parties must do. Imagine what manivalent foreign powers do. Because fake fans won't just influence what songs you like or what t-shirt you buy. They'll influence who you vote for, which leaders you admire, and what opinions you hold.

25:25Which brings me to the last study of this episode. It was conducted back in 2018 by two professors at Penn State University. They recruited 58 students at the university and asked them about the former American football coach at the university who was fired following a child sex abuse scandal. They picked that topic because they knew every student will have heard about the scandal and pretty much every student would have a very strong opinion about the case. They split the students into two groups. The first group of 34 people were invited to the study and asked for their opinions about the scandal in private to begin with.

26:02So what do you think about this scandal, but just tell the researcher in private. Next, they were told to sit at a table of other people, but unknown to the real participant, everybody else at that table was a paid actor. And those paid actors were trained to disagree immediately with whatever the real participant said. The question the researchers had is this. If everybody around you disagrees with you, will you change your mind? The answer, for many, is yes. 33 % of the students changed their view about this extremely sensitive case of child abuse simply because the other people around them disagreed with them.

26:43If a third of people can change their views about something as substantial as child abuse, imagine how many changed their views about a song or a melody after seeing that other people like it.

26:56Andrew Spelman: These kind of campaigns are also happening in the world of politics and other avenues as well. At least on this part, if you're pushing something, you're pushing someone's art into their feed. Percent, yeah. I mean, again, as managers who have done this for a long time, we are really passionate about putting great art into the world and great artists into the world. And so, yeah, I feel like if we're going to have to manipulate how to get a great song in front of somebody, it's good to do it with something that will make people happy. But it's not just a great artist or a great song. It's whoever is willing to pay.

27:29These agencies, they're not sharing amazing music because it's amazing. They're promoting those who can afford it. And I don't think that makes people happy. I think it makes people quite sad. And it makes me sad to admit that this, it really does work. All the evidence shows that we are swayed by the opinions of others. It'll affect the products we buy, the brands we like, the party we vote for, and the songs we adore. We are social creatures and we follow the herd. But unfortunately, today, it's never been easier to fake the herd and manipulate the masses.

28:10Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Nudge. Of course, I can't finish without doing a massive thank you to the brilliant podcast today in Focus. A large chunk of this show was inspired by them their episode titled fake fans fake buzz it completely inspired this episode there's clips from it in this episode so do go and listen to that after this they go on to explain how this affects the music industry in general it's a really really good listen i've left a link to that in the show notes thank you again to the federation of small businesses for supporting today's episode as i mentioned in the ad i am a member of the fsb i signed up with my own money before they sponsored the show and I do so because I run a small business that really benefits from their support.

28:53As a member I get member-only discounts which have saved me hundreds of pounds, I'm in a community of 500 ,000 others but more importantly I get legal advice, I get a hundred grand worth of cover for things like tax investigation protection and help with recovering debt from clients who haven't paid their invoices. As I have no employees I pay just£195 pounds per year and I've already made that back in their discounts but if I have any legal problems it'll be worth far far more than that so thank you again to the FSB for supporting today's show as a reminder they have kindly agreed to give a 10 % discount to all Nudge listeners to get that discount click the link in the show notes please do click that link and use the code Nudge at checkout you won't regret it and I want to end today's show by saying that Nudge has not and will never use fake fans to boost the popularity of this show.

29:43The reviews and the comments you see beneath each episode, they are 100 % real. Which means that I could use your help to compete with the hundreds of other shows that are probably paying for fake fandom. I really do need your reviews and your comments, so if you have liked today's show, please do consider leaving a five our review, leaving a comment or sharing it with a friend. Thanks again. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Cheers.