In short
Whether Geese’s breakout hype (and frontman Cameron Winter’s rise) was “organic” or manufactured via paid social-media manipulation, and what this reveals about how music discovery now works on TikTok/Instagram and streaming algorithms.
Guests
Nosheen Iqbal (host). Shad D’Souza (culture journalist; wrote about secretive music marketing mechanics). Jesse Koren and Andrew Spellman (founders of digital agency Chaotic Good Projects; discuss manufacturing virality). Eamon Ford (music journalist/author; business-side analysis of indie challenges and PR). Also mentioned: Reddit users and a Substacker named Eliza who investigated.
Key claims
Chaotic Good openly described creating fake fan accounts/sentiment to “control the narrative” and boost discourse; staff allegedly run many TikTok fan pages (multiple accounts/phones). Agencies also do UGC and “narrative” campaigns. Chaotic Good later removed its client list from its website.
Notable examples
Geese and Cameron Winter; other Chaotic Good clients cited (OK Lou, McGee, Dijon, tied to Justin Bieber). Comparisons to paid audience hype (Frank Sinatra). Indie breakthrough examples: Dry Cleaning; F-C-U-K-E-R-S (Ninja Tune). Algorithm effects: front-loaded hooks and playlist homogenisation.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Rise of Geese
1:01 to 2:36
Overview of the band Geese and their sudden popularity in indie music.
“Discovering new music you love, I'd argue, is still one of the most satisfying ways to feel good.”
Investigating Industry Plants
2:36 to 5:28
Discussion on the allegations of Geese being an industry plant and the role of digital agencies.
“what does it take to create the hot new thing in music?”
The Marketing Mechanism
5:28 to 8:07
Insights into how agencies create fake fan engagement and its implications.
“One thing that 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.”
Impact of Social Media on Music
8:07 to 11:28
Exploration of how social media influences music marketing and artist perception.
“There's a disdain for the commercial element of it all right?”
The Realities of Music Fame
11:28 to 14:02
Discussion on the authenticity of music fame and its implications for artists and fans.
“But essentially, they go to creators and say, oh, we're trying to spread a narrative that this artist is a generational songwriter.”
The Cynicism of Internet Hype
14:02 to 15:24
Explore the skepticism surrounding online music hype and its impact on fans.
“But lots of bands make fantastic records that don't get anywhere, right?”
Challenges for Indie Artists Today
15:39 to 17:56
Learn about the hurdles indie artists face in the digital age.
“Well, it's a challenge for every artist to get noticed today.”
The Evolving PR Landscape
17:56 to 20:49
Discover what effective music PR campaigns look like in the current market.
“So Spotify, Apple Music, digital service providers.”
Authenticity and Algorithmic Influence
22:58 to 25:04
Discuss the backlash against manufactured hype in music and the notion of authenticity.
“I guess the issue is that they're coming from an independent standpoint or alternative left field independent music.”
The Dystopian Nature of Music Algorithms
25:04 to 28:00
Examine how music algorithms affect creativity and industry standards.
“And I'm thinking of the fact that platforms count a stream if we listen for 30 seconds, which means a lot of modern pop is sort of front loading the hooks or reaching the climax before you've barely even settled in.”
Show all 11 chapters
The Impact of Algorithms on Indie Music
28:00 to 28:40
Explore how algorithms influence the music industry and artist exposure.
“or a playlist committee at Radio 1 who would put you on the C-list and see how it did and all of these things.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Shaad D’Souza:This is The Guardian.
0:07Eamonn Forde:Today, the fake fans behind your favourite band.
0:18Eamonn Forde:Parles-tu français?
0:19Shaad D’Souza:Hablas espanol?
0:20Eamonn Forde:Parli italiano?
0:22Shaad D’Souza:If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash acast. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash acast. Rules and restrictions may apply.
1:01You're on?
1:02Eamonn Forde:Yes, Dave. Let's do it.
1:11Eamonn Forde:Discovering new music you love, I'd argue, is still one of the most satisfying ways to feel good.
1:21Eamonn Forde:And so when fans flocked to Geese in the last year and made its frontman Cameron Winter the most talked-about indie star of the moment, it felt like a genuine rush of emotion and connection. A win for the grizzled Brooklyn aesthetic that hadn't been hip for at least a decade.
1:40Eamonn Forde:They ruled end-of-year lists. Their tours sold out. If you've never heard of them, I promise this was a big deal for a band that were barely born the last time New York bands were called.
1:54Eamonn Forde:but what if all the hype wasn't entirely authentic what if it was cooked up to make geese go viral the story of how one band dominates the cultural discourse would have been an argument left for the music press and indie blogs but in 2026 it's a saga that reveals a whole lot more about how we all consume music now. How we find it, how it's fed to us, and how the industry and musicians are desperately trying to adapt to technology that threatens their very existence.
2:32Eamonn Forde:From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, what does it take to create the hot new thing in music?
2:47Eamonn Forde:Shah D'Souza, you're a culture journalist and one of the bigger, let's call it discussions of the last couple of weeks on your beat has been this frenzied discussion around the band Geese and whether they are or are not an industry plant. They've generated a lot of hype. There's talk of fake acclaim and fanhood that isn't deserved or real. Can you just first of all, tell me about Geese, Cameron Winter and Their Eyes.
3:13Shaad D’Souza:So yeah it's been it's been a kind of crazy couple of weeks in the usually quite sedate world of indie rock but Geese basically are a band from New York a bunch of friends who grew up together went to high school together and who make this quite like jammy kind of bluesy rock but you know it's 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.
4:01Shaad D’Souza:A few months before that their frontman Cameron Winter had released an almost Rufus Wainwright-esque album of ten of piano folk songs.
4:21Shaad D’Souza:And then, you know, over the course of 2025, both Gis and Cam Winter both kind of like blew up.
4:28Eamonn Forde:And so what happened in the last month to call all that sort of genuine fandom and rise into question?
4:38Shaad D’Souza:At South by Southwest in Austin, which is a big kind of music and tech kind of industry festival, Billboard, which is kind of like the main music trade magazine, did a live podcast with the two founders of an agency called Chaotic Good Projects. How do songs go viral today in this incredibly crowded landscape? I'm joined here by Jesse Koren 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 two guys kind of talked about how one of the services they offer is essentially the creation of fake fan accounts or kind of like fake social sentiment to kind of like boost a certain artist.
5:23Shaad D’Souza:And they were kind of bragging. They were talking quite openly about this idea that they were able to manufacture virality for anyone. One thing that 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 but we can, you know, 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 I think and so a couple of people on Reddit and also a sub stacker named Eliza who's a musician saw that podcast and dug around a bit and saw that Geese and Cameron Winter as well was 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.
6:38Shaad D’Souza: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.
6:49Shaad D’Souza:Half of your favorite artist fans are fake. Uh-oh, guys. Geese is confirmed in industry plant. The fanfare... If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome.
7:10Eamonn Forde:Right, so suddenly the excitement around the band didn't seem so real anymore. And it's been a really big deal because it's caught fans off guard. partly because unlike Dua Lipa or some massive other star where we expect that some of their buzz is fate, you know, Frank Sinatra's publicist did famously pay fans to scream at his gigs, for instance. When it comes to 20-something artists from Brooklyn, do people just expect a lot more or at least something that resembles so-called authenticity?
7:42Shaad D’Souza:I think there's an understanding, you know, going back to like the 90s of this kind of pseudo code of ethics, I guess, you know, this idea that in indie music, you know, there's not much money, but we're a community and we all kind of band together and do things the honest way, quote unquote. And then also that in recent years, indie music has been maybe a refuge from a kind of corporatized world and a tech influenced world that has become harder and harder to trust.
8:10Eamonn Forde:There's a disdain for the commercial element of it all right?
8:14Shaad D’Souza:Yeah I think that barrier between the commercial and the quote-unquote underground has always been more porous than it might initially seem you know going back a decade you had people like Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend writing songs with Beyonce and we've always had artists going from the indie worlds let's say like you know Florence the Machine or someone and then kind of being catapulted to the kind of mainstream pop world but I think especially when it's like indie rock bands, quote unquote, I think people still have a lot of hang ups about, you know, being real, quote unquote.
8:46Eamonn Forde:Well, Shad, you have written a piece about the mechanics of this kind of secretive marketing campaign behind actually some of the biggest stars in music. Can you tell me more about this company, Chaotic Good, who, as you said, have been at the centre of this geese controversy?
9:02Shaad D’Souza:Yeah, so they offer a bunch of different services. But basically, one of the main ones that people are talking about is this kind of fan page service they offer where one of their staff members will make a bunch of TikTok fan pages for your artist and post on them a few times a day. I spoke to a lot of people for this story and someone I spoke to characterized Chaotic Good's kind of staff as like 25, 21 year olds each with seven phones. Right. And so they're all kind of like on TikTok all the time, you know, posting under different guises with different accounts and that kind of thing. They get the song on videos, they share live clips.
9:36Shaad D’Souza:Basically, they disseminate the band's music far and wide inorganically. You know, the outcomes of what they do are kind of a little obfuscated. I think no one can really tell whether this stuff works. But yeah, 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, you know, both indie and major alike do this in-house now as well.
10:17And when it comes to how we see that on Instagram, whatever, or TikTok,
10:23Eamonn Forde:are they paying influencers to post content? Are they using the songs for like TikTok dances? How does it actually look? How does it work?
10:29Shaad D’Souza:It depends. If you're kind of doing a fan page campaign, let's say just to use an example, obviously, she would never kind of employ these companies. But say it's Taylor Swift, it might be that Chaotic Good will make three Taylor Swift fan pages and post on them three times a day, you know, just clips from interviews or performances with captions like, oh my god, this is the moment she became a generational artist or something. Right. If you're doing a user-generated content campaign with Chaotic Good, they will kind of reach out to a network of creators they have and kind of ask them to use a song in their content.
11:06Shaad D’Souza:Say your single was like starting to go viral on TikTok and you really wanted to kind of add fuel to the fire, you would pay for the UGC campaign and then maybe they would send it to TikTok accounts that make montages of movies and, you know, put your song over it. And then there's narrative campaigns. 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 know, in one example I heard about, there was an artist who had worked on a big pop record, but the artists themselves didn't want to post about it because they didn't want to seem like they thought that was really cool.
11:49Shaad D’Souza:So Chaotic Good went out to a bunch of creators and said, oh, can you post that this person collaborated with this person so that people know it, but it's not coming direct from the source. It's very contrived, but also kind of simple. You know, it's this weird thing of like, oh, why didn't I think of that? So all we do at Chaotic Good is look what happens organically and then do it inorganically at scale. And so like, you know, when someone announces a tour, for example, like, you know, as managers, that's like the biggest day of the year is the tour on sale. Like that is where the majority of your revenue will come from.
12:22Shaad D’Souza:And these days, like it's crazy to us. Like artists will just post a static flyer on Instagram. 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. And so it does get overwhelming because I don't think the pendulum is swinging back anytime soon.
12:44Eamonn Forde:So how have Chaotic Good responded in light of all the backlash? What have they done and said?
12:49Shaad D’Souza:They have removed their client list from their website. And that's basically it.
12:54Eamonn Forde:Right. So all those artists that we could see before that they were working with, they don't mention them now?
12:59Shaad D’Souza:No, no, not anymore. The interesting thing about this is that I think in the future, once you know that this is happening, it's hard to go online and see any social content about an artist you like and think that it's real unless you know the person who's actually made it
13:22Eamonn Forde:okay so on the one hand agencies like chaotic good will flood the zone with fan pages how do they use influencers you're essentially paying a bunch of creators to say they love this
Read the full transcript
13:33Shaad D’Souza: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 and you know sharing it online being like oh my god i just happened to see alex warren's surprise set in the tube station just now
14:01Shaad D’Souza:I mean look me personally I'm always kind of thinking that everything on the internet is fake anyway you know I've been on the internet yeah I've been on the internet my whole life and like I've known that this kind of stuff was happening for a while so I've always taken a very cynical eye to any kind of hype really but I think it's understandable that maybe fans would be slightly betrayed.
14:26Eamonn Forde:But lots of bands make fantastic records that don't get anywhere, right? They don't get that level of exposure. So there is a little bit of A and a little bit of B.
14:34Shaad D’Souza:Geese were already on this trajectory, is what I'm trying to say, before they ever started employing K.Light Good or ByWord, which is another agency they employed that does a similar thing. And, you know, I think about the acclaim they're getting and, you know, the tours they're selling and that kind of thing. It doesn't feel that out of pocket for like an indie band of their level, you know, based on the kind of tours they were doing around the last album. The irony to this is you can't really create super fans using these kinds of techniques. You know, you can make people aware of these artists, but then the moment real fans kind of find out about it, they feel extremely betrayed, which I thought was kind of the sad irony of it all.
15:24Eamonn Forde:Eamon Ford, welcome to Today in Focus. Hello. Now, you're a music journalist who focuses on the business side of things, which is the industry itself, basically. And you've spent decades analysing how it works and how it's evolved. Could you tell me firstly, what are the primary challenges for indie artists trying to get noticed today?
15:45Shaad D’Souza:Well, it's a challenge for every artist to get noticed today. you've got a kind of double dynamic of the barriers to entry have been greatly lowered in the digital age. So effectively, anyone can put their music up on a streaming service like Spotify or add it to TikTok's library. And that's great. And that's a wonderfully egalitarian approach. But the problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of tracks being ingested into these platforms every day. I think Spotify has well over, I think it's like 150 million tracks. It's an incredible number that you will never, ever be able to listen to.
16:26Shaad D’Souza:Then you've got in recent years, the double problem of AI generated music as well. And then that just goes into this enormous, enormous pool of music that is all competing for attention. Because in the streaming world, revenue is driven by the number of streams that you get. But it's not generating any money. So you need to find ways to get people to listen to your music, to listen to it over and over and over again, or people at scale to listen to your music. So you're competing with a huge number of humans making music and an increasing number of AOE tracks.
17:01Eamonn Forde:And you've mentioned all of that without even factoring in, you know, the absolute decline in music sales, the difficulty of touring, supply chains, all the rest of it. I mean, there are like multiple facets to what makes it more and more difficult today as an indie artist than it was 30 years ago.
17:17Shaad D’Souza:Yeah. It used to be if you got a decent advance, some of that would go to studio costs. Some of that would go to actually your living costs where you could give up your job and you could focus full time. and it's it's such a common thing for uh small labels or to sign into small labels to actually have a full-time job so whether or not they're they're working in music or they're working in cafes or factories or doing zero hour contracts and then that obviously limits the amount of time that they've got to go on tour because then they're not they're not making money so the the whole system seems very much stacked against small independent orders just simply because it's very very difficult to make a living as a musician and so Eamon in your experience
18:02Eamonn Forde:what does a good music PR campaign look like these days in old money uh in the analog days
18:10Shaad D’Souza:it was basically were you written about in the traditional music press then maybe that would have filtered into the broadsheets of the tabloids were you getting played on radio so and back in the days when it was like a handful of radio stations or specialist DJs would play independent music if you got on there that was half the battle so you were you you got in front of the audience that was most likely to buy your music today you've got to be everywhere that's the problem if certainly if you want to have a career at any scale so you need to be on what's left of the music press, you need to be on radio, but you also are now battling on what they call DSPs.
18:54Shaad D’Souza:So Spotify, Apple Music, digital service providers. Sorry, it's a terrible, awful music industry acronym.
19:00Eamonn Forde:We love a bit of jargon.
19:01Shaad D’Souza:So there's all of these problems and you're competing with all of these different people. You're competing in a truly global way, in a way that was inconceivable 20 years ago.
19:12Eamonn Forde:But what does it look like now? Who has broken through with an impressive campaign?
19:17Shaad D’Souza:If you're talking about breakthrough artists, I guess you could look at someone like Ray, someone like Olivia Dean in the UK, I guess Sam Fender, although he broke through a few years ago. But I think that most of them are major backed. So they've got lots of money from major labels to throw at them. I guess in terms of kind of breakthrough smaller artists, I guess someone like Dry Cleaning has done pretty well from an independent perspective. I don't know if I can say their name out loud, but F-C-U-K-E-R-S, I believe F-C-U-K-E-R-S is the polite way to talk about them. They've broken through. They're obviously an American duo, but they're on Ninja Tune, an independent label.
20:09Shaad D’Souza:And they've done really well because they got a lot of buzz around what they were doing. They got on TV shows and then that helps as well because TV shows travel in a way that they didn't in the past. Because obviously with YouTube, you can perform on Saturday Night Live UK or Jimmy Kimmel. And within 20 minutes of going off stage, your video will be on YouTube and will be shared. And that kind of spreads out. So I guess the thing is that it used to be you needed two or three big statement pieces in a campaign. Now you need about 40.
20:48Coming up, can you escape the algorithm?
21:01Shaad D’Souza:I'm Kai Wright. I'm Kari Sherman. And we are here to tell you about our new show, which is rooted in this feeling that at least I have, I know you have, where, you know, it's kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone and you're just hit in the face with a fire hose of news, right? There's war, there's authoritarianism, our planet is burning. I could go on and on and on. And on and on and on. But, like, we're trying to figure out how to manage it, right? Like, how do you manage it? I manage it by leaning in and trying to learn more and trying to figure out, OK, how can I be smarter about this particular topic?
21:38Shaad D’Souza:And who can I talk to that's going to make me feel better about it? And who can tell me who's responsible for the mess that I'm reading about? So that's our mission. That's the show. Welcome to Stateside with Kai and Carter. We're a new show from The Guardian. We're talking to big thinkers and the best journalists just trying to understand the world through smart conversation and honest reporting.
21:57Eamonn Forde:We don't have billionaires telling us what to say. Stateside with Kyan Carter will come out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, starting May 13th.
22:05Shaad D’Souza:Follow on Apple Podcasts or catch us wherever you watch or listen.
22:18Shaad D’Souza:If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash acast. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash acast. Rules and restrictions may apply.
22:58Eamonn Forde:Given everything you've said, why do you think it is that people have been so upset or irate to learn that bands that they love, like Geese in this instance, have paid firms to boost them on social media algorithms, you know, with these sort of fake, almost manufactured hype on Instagram and TikTok and so on?
23:18Shaad D’Souza:I guess the issue is that they're coming from an independent standpoint or alternative left field independent music. They're on a very well-respected independent label called Partizan as well. And I guess baked into that is this idea of authenticity, that somehow or other everything has to be real and it cannot be manufactured. because God forbid that a musician is seen as a commercial proposition in 2026 in that world, because there's so much romanticisation of independence. And you can see that dates back to the 1970s and the 1980s with the birth of the proper independence circuit in the UK.
24:01Shaad D’Souza:If you take the exact same argument and apply it in a different genre, so if you took that and applied it to K-pop or explicitly mainstream pop, I don't think anyone would care because they go like, of course, it has to be marketed. Of course, it has to be high because that's how pop works, because they don't care about this idea of authenticity. That is the scrabbling artist, the hardscrabble life. And then they get their magical moment and then their great art wins through. All of them from all of your favorite artists had a label behind them that was pushing them, be that Joy Division or The Smiths or Oasis or Pulp or whoever you love has had some sort of machinery behind them.
24:42Shaad D’Souza:They're not, like, the word organic gets bandied about a lot in the music industry, which is a kind of weasel word. It doesn't actually mean anything anymore. It's almost like trying to make a false ideological point to say, oh, it's organic. There was no jiggery-pokery going on there. And of course there is.
25:04Eamonn Forde:Eamon, is there a worry for music fans that the algorithm is flattening out what we're listening to and what gets noticed? And I'm thinking of the fact that platforms count a stream if we listen for 30 seconds, which means a lot of modern pop is sort of front loading the hooks or reaching the climax before you've barely even settled in. And then, you know, there's My Pet Hate, which is the banding together of music under these sort of tediously unimaginative playlists called chill mix or workout playlists. So that, you know, it homogenises the sound until it's all background filler, encourages musicians to write to a certain tempo or production style just to get on those playlists.
25:42Eamonn Forde:How much do you see it affecting music making and music taste today?
25:47Shaad D’Souza:Well, those kind of theme playlists, it's almost turning music from art into something that's functional. And I guess the big concern is that it's using technology to kind of create affinity or to create threads for you to start to follow. I guess the idea is that what Spotify and Apple Music want to do is they want to kind of take a lot of the choice away from you and they think that they're doing that as a favour. So they're just going like, trust us, guys, trust the brand.
26:20Eamonn Forde:I hate it. I hate it so much.
26:22Shaad D’Souza:Yeah, so this is a problem. But that just presumes that's the only way that people listen. Some people do. Some people might just want a top 40 playlist and they might listen to commercial radio in the car and that kind of thing. And that's what they want. But that just presumes that audiences are incredibly passive. And it's almost like artists are either told explicitly to write music that will please the algorithm. this sounds like very dystopian when you hear apocryphal tales of A &R meetings with artists saying oh yeah we need a single write something that will work on Spotify in the same way that artists were told we need a radio single so it's no different from that really
27:03Eamonn Forde:So to conclude you can't really escape the algorithm you're fine to like geese and maybe listen to a music critical too if you want to find out what's new, what's good
27:15Shaad D’Souza:I think like when people talk about them paying for the TikTok accounts. I don't see that as any different from someone paying an influencer or a micro-influencer to talk about their brand or whatever else. Because that's... But it's music.
27:32Eamonn Forde:It's not supposed to be product. It's art.
27:35Shaad D’Souza:I'm not saying that this is good, but I'm just saying that I don't know why this is... Trying to gain the TikTok algorithm in this way is no different from using micro-influencers because they don't like that music. So it's like where we get our references from are all conditional anyway, because it used to be human gatekeepers. So you needed to get a journalist who was favourable to your music or was prepared to write about you or a DJ that would play you or a playlist committee at Radio 1 who would put you on the C-list and see how it did and all of these things. Now so much of it is decided by the mysterious nebulous algorithm.
28:15Shaad D’Souza:And it's all a bit mysterious and loads of artists are going like, we don't know how this works. What are we supposed to do? And you're kind of fighting against this mysterious digital force.
28:31Eamonn Forde:That was music journalist and author Eamon Ford and cult writer Shard D'Souza. My thanks to both of them. You can read Shard's piece. Indie music has been invaded by fake fans and cynical viral campaigns. Here's how deep it goes. or at theguardian.com. You can also buy Eamon's book, 1999, The Year the Record Industry Lost Control. That's available in all good bookshops now. Big recommend. Before we go, I just want to tell you about a new video podcast that our New York office is launching. It's called Stateside with Kai and Carter, and it's hosted by our colleagues Kai Wright and Carter Sherman.
29:08Eamonn Forde:Each week, they're going to be trying to make sense of some of the biggest stories happening right now. The show will feature conversations with some of the smartest thinkers and reporters, not just from The Guardian, but across the world. It's launching on 13th of May with episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You can find it in full video on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. And that's everything for today. This episode was presented by me, Nosheen Iqbal. It was produced by Elena Biggs and Alex Atak. Sound design is by Rudy Zagadlow and the executive producers were Sammy Kent and Hummer Khalili.
29:40Eamonn Forde:We'll be back this afternoon with the latest.
29:48Shaad D’Souza:This is The Guardian.
30:01Shaad D’Souza:Parles-tu français? Hablas espanol?
30:04Eamonn Forde:Parli italiano?
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