Is it really that bad if a band is an industry plant? Geese, marketing and public outrage
While in Italy the “new voices” of the music industry seem to all emerge from Mediaset, with the support of the now twenty-year-old platform of Amici by Maria De Filippi, overseas artists pop up as if out of nowhere. With a single catchy enough to end up on the radio, but slightly different from the norm in order to stand out from the crowd, bands, singer-songwriters and pop stars climb the charts within just a few days. It’s not just about talent, of course, but about storytelling, a synergy between marketing and product capable of launching a musical project onto the most famous stages. But when someone - the press, fans, critics, haters - raises the accusation of an “industry plant”, the entire team finds itself facing a significant obstacle: the ruin of reputation.
But what is all this obsession with exposing marketing operations in the creative scene?
The Geese case
The Geese, an emerging New York indie rock band, are allegedly an industry plant. From sold-out tours to their show at the Coachella festival, and a notable appearance on Saturday Night Live, the band rose to prominence with Getting Killed, an album (their fourth) that quickly climbed the US charts during 2025. Suspicions that it was a band built in a lab by major industry players were raised from the beginning, but last week a Substack post later picked up by Wired from musician and writer Eliza McLamb strengthened the theory.
Behind the success of Geese, McLamb explains, is Chaotic Good, a marketing agency that uses social media to promote its clients with a highly effective strategy. The founders explained its mechanism very explicitly to Billboard: they create a network of accounts on social media that simulates spontaneous interactions by sharing clips, comments, and content about the artists they promote, until they become embedded in the recommendation algorithm (the For You Page). The agency has worked with Geese and with the band’s frontman, Cameron Winter - who on his own achieved success thanks to the viral track online Love Takes Miles - but Chaotic Good claims it has not falsified streaming numbers in either case. What appears to have driven the popularity of Geese and Winter, they said, was digital PR work: the involvement of real people in creating content about the band and the frontman.
Not the only one
@hyperpopwh0re bc a lot of you need to fucking hear this rn. #tiffanyday #electroclash #hyperpop #musictok #edm TELL ME WHAT I DID - Tiffany Day
What makes all this controversy deeply ironic is that Geese are not the first case of an industry plant - and they will not be the last. There is an endless list of artists who have reached success thanks only to the support of marketing agencies and public relations professionals, from major K-pop acts (the Korean music industry controls not only their image and publicity, but also their training process, often broadcast on TV as in the case of Twice) to Britney Spears (whose career has been engineered since she was a child), and even the One Direction, who owe their success to producer Simon Cowell’s strategic mind, who put them together.
The only difference between Geese, Twice, and One Direction is that the success of the latter was openly planned, in full view of the public. What seems to truly irritate the public is not so much the fact that the band received marketing help to become famous, but the realization of having been the victim of a publicity stunt: in pop, the pact is explicit; in indie rock, authenticity is one of the genre’s cornerstones. This is why just a couple of years ago the English band Wet Leg was also accused of being an industry plant, despite also being - as recently revealed - on Chaotic Good’s client list. Based on this information, one might wonder how far marketing privilege can extend within genres: indie rock, apparently, is not among the lucky ones.
A genre problem?
Let’s assume that Geese and Cameron Winter are indeed industry plants, a “fake” band and singer built by an agency paid to promote them. Let’s also assume that the streaming numbers accumulated by the band on platforms were artificially manipulated to inflate their popularity. With this information, would the quality of their music cease to exist? Are those who find themselves in their songs, who are moved while listening to their lyrics, somehow fake as well? Perhaps we are inflating a problem that does not exist - or at least one that has always existed in the music industry and therefore does not deserve so much outrage.
In the Billboard interview, other names appear who relied on Chaotic Good to promote their music: Dijon, Mk.gee, Laufey, Wet Leg, Oklou, as well as pop stars Dua Lipa and Justin Bieber. The list, which appears to have been removed from the agency’s website after McLamb’s Substack post, clearly shows how marketing has become the engine that drives the entire music industry, indie rock included. But while it is normal for the artist peers of Geese to feel frustrated seeing the band leverage powerful industry tools to rise through competition - for the same reason an actor might be irritated when a nepo baby steals a role - the same cannot be said for the listening public. Marketing is persistent, intrusive, and now taken for granted, but fortunately listeners still have the freedom to choose what music they want to hear.