Everything Is Content - Everything In Conversation: The Panic About Fake Fans

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

Happy extra episode day EICulture critics, this week we're diving into the panic around bots, fake fans and inauthentic musicians. US rock band Geese were dragged into a PR nightmare when eagle-eyed people noticed Chaotic Good, a digital marketing agency, claimed they were behind the recent meteoric rise of the band thanks to an orchestrated social media campaign. Just how manipualtive are these carefully-crafted popularity pushes, and do they detract from the artists' talent? We dive into all of it with your help <3 love O,R,B xoxox-----Fake FansThe wild Geese chaseThe Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth. I'm Rachera and I'm Anoni. And this is Everything in Conversation. The title track on the album of content. We'd love for you to take part in these conversations, whether you're agreeing or disagreeing, we want to hear from you. And you can share your takes by following us on Instagram at Everything is Content Pod. That's where we decide on topics and invite you to get involved. Would you care if your favourite band had hired a company to fabricate the hype that brought you. brought them to your ears. A wired article published early this month reported that the rapid rise of the band Geese was driven by a sci-op or trend simulation campaign managed by PR firm Chaotic Good, which allegedly used fake accounts to generate artificial hype. A big part of what we're doing is trying to simulate the idea that the song is trending, said Andrew Spellman, who is the co-founder

of the marketing agency Chaotic Good Projects. This strategy described as a shift towards engineered non-organic music marketing, ignited debate regarding authenticity and modern industry practices. The substack titled Fake Fans by Eliza McClam, mentioned in the wirepiece, makes a great case against the current iteration of fandoms that we witness online. She argues that the internet demands a, quote, totalising devotion, where fans feel pressured to defend every aspect of an artist's life, creating a, quote, sanitised, flattened version of culture, end quote. She writes, culture has become a means to an end where we use it to signal to others who we are. We have forgotten how to just like things without needing to be an expert or an advocate, she says.

So the wide piece goes on, quote, essentially chaotic 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 background of videos. Live clips are shared. Sometimes banner 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.

Eliza McClam is an artist herself, and she writes, If 100 people think your song sucks, chaotic good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome. There's no going back to pre-Naptor times. Now that songs are files and files are godless, record sales mean nothing, and the analogue revolution won't change that. Records used to mean fans, which meant more money. Now that there are no records, it's just fans and the money. The fans are a renewable resource.

Ciotic Good knows that you can create a fan through imitation. Geese are at the centre of this, specifically because, as Eliza writes, people may expect this of more mainstream pop artists and bands. Quote, I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass market commercial pop. Secretly, also, that this was the only kind of music such marketing would work for, she writes. So, Ritura, you sent another great piece of this puzzle, which was by Brian Broderick for Garbage Day, called The Wild Geese Chase. The Geese Sciop is a Cyop in which he essentially challenges how effective these marketing firms actually are and whether or not the

wired article acts more as a puff piece for the industry creating these viral moments. And he writes, it's much more likely that they, geese, got popular the way many bands do. They wrote some good songs that people like and have rich enough parents to have the support they needed to focus on writing more of them. Okay, firstly, are you both fans of geese? I know that we have actually spoken about them on this podcast before. Do you think this is a sci-op? And did you know that this kind of thing was happening in the music industry before now? I like geese and I have listened to probably three or four Cameron Winter songs.

I am not a huge fan only because I need to come to things in my own time. Everyone's talking about them now. It'll probably be 2028 and you'll go, what have you been loving this week, Beth? And I'll go, there's this band called Geese. So I will get there in time. But I take my cues from people whose music tastes are really trusting to do in my partner, you guys, people that I follow who have been really raving about geese and Cameron Winter since 2021, but especially obviously last year when the album came out.

So I was a little bit leery of this headline in the way this was framed of this is a sire up everything you think you know about this band and how they came into your ears is false. You've been swindled and you're a schmark. Because I thought that's not, I mean, it's also not really what these pieces are saying. It's just what the initial discourse was saying. So I thought with research, surely it will prove otherwise. And really, it doesn't seem like a grand conspiracy. It just like a really ugly facet of the music industry in all industries that maybe we'd rather avoid. Like it's just a really depressing reality of how everything is internet. Stats don't mean anything. You know, organics. streams and finding stuff. Grassroots is sort of a thing of the past. I feel that geese have been unfairly, like the goose has been gandered and I feel bad for those guys. I do like geese. I also came to them last year and I've basically just accepted that I am the victim in these kind of digital PR spin campaigns. I am the perfect person to get drawn into them because I follow them and then I find out about these people a la Chapel Rowan. I only noticed her when there were so many videos and TikToks of her going viral on social media. So yeah, I'm the perfect victim for this.

And I kind of don't care because it's not like we're all going to gigs, you know, with 10 to 20 people anymore. It's not that I would even know about these things anymore because everything is so centered on the internet and it's so hard to know. I would really love for music to feel like people always talk about in the heyday where you would see a sticker at a pub for something that looked really cool. You would just go down on the day of that sticker, not knowing at all what it was, discover something, meet a bunch of people, be part of a scene. That sounds lovely. That sounds fucking lovely. But the reality is things have changed and the internet is just how it is. I think reading this piece and also reading the kind of anti take on it from Ryan Broderick,

I have something of like a middle feeling about it. And I agree with you, Beth, where I just feel like it doesn't change my opinion about geese. It just makes me feel depressed about the state of music. And I think I did know about these fan orchestrated companies that invest in two. creating hype around music because my partner was a music journalist for 10 years. So having spoken to his friends who are still in music, one of them works at such a place. And his service is to basically promise an artist that you can reach X amount of people through these digital means. And in the past, that would be a PR company. They would say, we can get you a million eyeballs on your new record. We would get you a place in crack magazine. We would get you a place in Rolling Stone,

blah, blah, blah. That is now irrelevant and that is now redundant. And these are kind of the new of that. So in a way, when you think about it like that, it is kind of bleak, but it is kind of just the new face of PR and a music label. But I do get why people feel disillusioned, because it kind of undermines this idea that we're all independent people with taste. We actually aren't, I'm sorry to break it to everyone. We actually are not anymore. I think if something is objectively good, the only way to get it in front of you is by doing things like this. So yes, you have good taste, but you know you're not coming to anything independently. I think that is now impossible. It's depressing, but I don't think you can blame Geese. I'm on the same page as you, Beth. I think it's

more depressing at the state of play and the fact that independent taste, curation, all of those things have gone out the fucking window thanks to algorithms and mostly short-form video. What do you think and only? Well, as you both know, I got into Geese through my good friend John Robbins on the Alice and John podcast because he recommended them and I decided to start listening to him. So I do really like I agree with what both of you said and we actually had a really interesting message from Vivian along those lines which said, I guess I'm not seeing the big deal. It feels like what all modern marketing is, is it a bit manipulative, perhaps? But you also can't force people to like music, buy records and go to gigs if the artist or band isn't any good and has no appeal. I think the

time industry plant gets thrown around all the time to the point where no one ever knows what it means and it's just used to tear down the latest hot artist or band because the internet loves to drag someone down when they're at the top. This all feels so inconsequential. and like manufactured outrage to me. So that's kind of what you guys are saying and I do agree with it. I guess the bit where it starts to rub for me a little bit is that this discoverability thing of the internet

at one point was seen as a sort of meritocracy, e.g. Justin Bieber in his bedroom on YouTube could be singing songs and be discovered by genuinely just random people watching him and create the career that he's had now. Whereas what's happened is people have gone, oh, that's a great thing that was happening organically. Let's find a way to package that up and sell it back to people, which means that with the right privilege, which goes back to our kind of like

Lena Dunham episode we did last week, is this going to mean that actually the people that we are seeing at the top again have one face, one look, one sound because they're the people that are able to access from the start, the kind of money that you need to plug into these companies in order to create these viral moments. And it's true, obviously, if someone is really shit, and I've seen it and there's been various people throughout history of the last decade that have appeared on like the Daily Mail constantly and everyone's like who is this and they don't do anything of no and you're kind of thinking why and it's just they've got rich parents who are paying for them to be constantly out everywhere so this is something that has happened all the time but it does give me a bit of a nicky feeling it's from remember when you too just put a song on everyone's iPod yeah that felt that felt that felt manipulative you're right I felt pissed off at that

and people did in our comments while I was saying about like espresso being on every single that you could not get away from espresso being on any album made on spot it could be like 90s hits and espresso would be like the number one song. So I don't know. I get it. It's like, oh, yeah, that's the way the world works. But I don't know, that makes me feel a bit nihistic viewing it like that. Because it does, it is a bit sad. And I do really, I think that's why I love like Daisy Jones and the six so much. But I really am nostalgic for a time that I didn't live through, which is what you said, Richard, just stumbling across a band in the back of a pub and being like, oh, I remember when I saw the Beatles. I was just having a point. I think we should bring that back. And I think people getting pissed off at this. We need to redirect it into creating and

cultivating an in-person experience of culture. And I really, I'm not saying that flippantly. I really mean it. That's what I'm craving. And I feel like we're all feeling the same. We just need that. Yeah, because we've all chosen to outsource. We've all gotten lazy in all regards. We do just consume food through the phone. And then we get annoyed that we've just consumed through the phone, not to say that we are necessarily to blame a lot of these things are manipulated on purpose to make us never leave the phone. We did get a message from Emily who said, have to say, I'm pretty excited to see men being accused of this over women for a change, except in this case it seems to be true

and then she ends her message saying bot farming is very the machine to me and would put me off a band if I felt the hype wasn't real and was manufactured. And I think this is the point. I think this is horrible PR for geese. I think it's worth stressing

that really what they've done is hire a very normal company to post their clips on the internet to do something. I mean, it all sounds very covert and deep state and actually they're a PR company. It's something, you know, we all, even the three of us if we get to a point

where we have pocket money and we want to grow. that is the machine you have to play into to pay someone not to manipulate and not to falsify streams, but to get you in front of eyeballs. It's how the economy works. And it's something that's touched on actually in a piece for Consequence of Sound by Ren Graves, who writes, does hiring a firm like chaotic good make the problem worse? Probably. Every band that pays to game the algorithm makes organic discovery a little harder for the band that can't. But blaming geese for hiring a TikTok marketing firm is like blaming a serial brand for paying for shelf space at eye level.

Every supermarket charges for placement and it means the brand with less money ends up on the bottom shelf. That's a legitimate problem but the answer is to fix how shelves work not to accuse Cheerios of fraud and I think that's maybe the takeaway for me is that this is a rotten system that doesn't accurately reward talent

and hard work in a kind of sensible, meaningful way which robs artists of opportunities and robs us listeners and consumers of art of really great art and we do get flooded with stuff that has just got financial backing. So I do think it's a depressing reality, but again, this is not a geese-specific problem. This is not a, I knew there was something fishy about those chaps. It's really not that at all.

So we had a message from James that said genuinely never heard of them or their music. However, manipulation has been going on the industry for decades, even before social media, it's not different. The thing that I think is different is that we don't know it's happening. So like we know when we see a billboard or an advert on TV or we get an advert for something, we know it's an ad. When it's bots, you do know it. Like honestly, we spoke out as before, but Twitter, every single comment underneath is just a bot. But without the naked eye being able to detect that all these other people co-signing something aren't actually real and that it's just like one man with a load of code on a computer somewhere. I think that

is where the dishonesty kind of lies because we are pack animals. So it's really weird. I notice this with myself, but I'll watch a funny reel. And if it has like two likes on explore, I almost don't want to like it. So I'm like, well, no one else is like this. If a reel has like 100,000 likes. I'll get one second in and I'm already ready to kind of heart it. Because it's been co-signed, it's safe, this is what the people like. It's not conscious at all. It's when I clock myself doing it, I think, wow, I am really impacted by feeling like there is already a number of people that are saying this thing is good. So I think that actually popularity can breed people liking things. Hype is the thing, even when that thing is quite shit.

And we see it with stuff like, I don't understand Supreme. What is this? I see people queuing for it in Soho. I don't really know why. But that's like a really good example of where sometimes actually the numbers do just create a thing that would never have existed without the numbers. It's all like a Russian doll chicken and egg kind of thing. People love queuing. I actually would love to do an episode on this. I'm actually, I am so angry that people are back into queuing. I hate it.

People need to get a life. If something's got a cue, leave it. I'll go to the queue. People were properly queuing at the Victoria. I was telling you this, but the tube in a way that like you just barge through those barriers. This is not like it was a single file line at Vauxhall. And I was like, I was like, can I just walk to the front of this? Because this is so long.

I don't like it. It's so silly. And you're completely right. And I am also a damn full because when I was in Tokyo last year, there was this donut place that had come from the US called I Am Donut question mark, which is also a stupid name. Anyway, the queue was like two hours worth of queue. I saw it. I spent two hours of my holiday queuing in this thing because I thought, if this many people have

waited, it must be good. tell me why the donuts were average. Oh no. Yeah. Two hours gone. Could have told you. I mean, yeah, it's one of those things actually. It's psychology.

It really does get all of us. Even when we're trying to resist something, we are playing into that psychology of popularity. It's really messed up. One thing that I was thinking about, and quite a few people have noted this, including McClam in her substack, is how good could these guys actually be

if their way of generating like self-published is to essentially reveal how the magic trick is done and kind of throw their artists, including geese, under the bus, to make it look as if either they, either it's galaxy brains and they just wanted the hype and this is all part of a grand plan, or they're so stupid as to think, probably geese wouldn't want to be associated with something like this, like this kind of grimy, fake manufactured success machine, which is people are really misunderstanding it. It feels like they're just burning bridges before they're built, doing something which, and in the garbage depies, Ryan Broderick writes, like, no one's

even sure that this actually works. Like, it's a really inexact science. And companies like TikTok have a vested interest in making sure that people are not able to do this kind of manipulation. And Ryan writes about when this did happen in the past with Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate basically incentivized his own followers to flood TikTok with his name to give them some kind of kickback. And suddenly Andrew Tate was everywhere. Maybe we didn't do the podcast then, but people were talking about it. And TikTok then went, shit, what have we done? And they've changed that.

Anyone who claims to have this like algorithmic secret source way to completely manipulate these things, I think it's snake oil. and I do think handle with care. One, someone who says that they can do this for you and two accusations that this has been done. I think everyone is basically in the dark about how these things work and it is just a kind of Hail Mary

and just a lot of fluff to say, yeah, don't worry. We'll make you go viral. Like it's like a confidence trick. I completely agree with you and I was going to say that exact thing. That was the thing in the Ryan Broderick piece that really made me think I think we need to just maybe take a breath because there is so much vested interest into saying that your company is able to manipulate these forces.

But if that were true, then surely you would be profiting and you would be the billionaire to rival or billionaires, because that is the secret source that everyone is wanting right now. It's the thing that we want. It's the thing that anyone who is starting a career with any kind of tangential relationship to the internet wants. But like, geese are doing well, but don't get me wrong. I don't see them making billions of pounds every single day and, you know, getting the riches that they want to get.

They seem to be doing really well. They've had a massive meteoric rise in the past year or so. also had a new album come out, but it still seems to be they're not, I don't know, they don't seem to be benefiting in the way that a company could be suggesting if they understand how to manipulate the internet's algorithms. That just seems like the chalice that everyone is looking for in this moment that people are desperately craving. It just feels like snake oil, I agree. The good thing is though, if people do keep trying to do this, it will be bots and AI that kill the internet. And we have spoken about how we actually desperately want to talk about the new

sheer luxe models that they've hired which are like these four AI women and I do think this will actually be the death of the internet and hopefully the rebirth of things like Edinburgh Fringe Festival which have lost their way but at one point in time you could go to a place for a week where you could watch like the best actors and the best comedians up and coming with no real name to them in the public eye and you'd pay like put a pound in a bucket and genuinely it would be kind of like crowd sourced talent being found on the ground and I think that is a place that we need to get back to and I wonder if ironically. And I mean she does, Eliza McAlam does write the top of her piece that since the wide thing came out and all of the hoo-ha, chaotic good have removed some of the names of the artists and kind of changed what they've said.

But yeah, like Ryan Broderick says, is this just a puff fee for these industries? But in a weird way, I do think the more and more this stuff happens, the more and more I get fatigued seeing bot stuff because I just get, it's exhausting, just reading the same comment over and over again when you're trying to find like an interesting bit of discourse. It might be that this is the thing that gets us with our boots back on the ground in some little indie bars. The other problem is, as we were discussed, though, no one has money to leave the house. But if we resolve that, fix the economy and we're away. Maybe we can start one of these companies, make our billions, and then we'll all get off line. One last thing that I was thinking about is it sort of is also towing the line, not that chaotic good are doing this, but there's a lot that toes the line or just crosses the line in terms of legality.

Like the piece he talks about, I think it's both in the consequence of soundpiece and garbage day. Talk about bot accounts and like bot campaigns that are illegal because they flood the market with fake songs. Bot accounts listened to them, stream them billions of times. And I think there was a musician in 2024 who did this and was indicted for a streaming fraud scheme that net $10 million in royalties, basically uploading fake songs, using bots VPNs, basically stealing a lot of money from this pool of royalties completely fraudulently. And that is illegal. Drake has also been accused of this. First, he accused Universal of doing this to Kendrick Lamar's. That was dismissed.

And then he has been named in multiple lawsuits saying that a significant portion of his many billions of Spotify. streams. I'm driven my bot networks. He has been accused. So I, you know, it feels like actually there is a real underbelly of this. And it's completely illegal. So anyone who kind of sells this, are you doing, you know, be very wary of these things. There's so much like illegality going on.

Thank you so much for listening. And for all of your opinions and takes on this topic, we love being in conversation with you all. Please also give us a follow on Instagram and TikTok and everything is content pod and a review wherever you're listening if you haven't already we'll see you as always on Friday bye