The wild Geese chase

Yesterday, WIRED published a story titled “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop.” Just from the headline, I immediately knew it was about Chaotic Good Projects, a company I had looked into a few weeks ago after I stumbled across subtweets about them on X. Unlike WIRED, however, I ultimately held off on covering them because, well, I thought the company was full of shit. And I wanted some more time to figure out exactly how full of shit they were. But let’s back up a bit.

Chaotic Good Projects is a digital marketing company that claims they can do “trend simulation,” using accounts that look like normal internet users to influence platforms like TikTok. Up until last month, Chaotic Good had the band Geese listed on their website as one of their clients using their “UGC campaigns.” Chaotic Good scrubbed the page of any mention of their clients after musician Eliza McLamb wrote a Substack piece titled “Fake Fans” about Chaotic Good’s shady “narrative campaigns.” Though, McLamb’s piece — which is worth reading — focuses far more on the punishing algorithmic rat race young artists are forced to compete in now. The WIRED story, on the other hand, basically calls Geese an industry plant supported by “ginned-up interactions” from Chaotic Good. And happily takes at face value Chaotic Good’s claims that they create “networks of social media pages (typically on TikTok) and use them to drive the band’s music into the recommendation algorithm.”

The blowback against WIRED’s report has been pretty immense. McLamb had to put out a statement on X, writing “It’s important to me to say that I do not consider Geese to be a ‘psy-op’ and [told WIRED] as much.” Music critic Anthony Fantano wrote on X, “One of the most stupid, irresponsible, and vapid headlines/pieces I’ve read from wired. Shame.” And journalist Max Read wrote on Bluesky, “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.” Which is exactly the problem here.

There are a lot of companies out there that claim they can manipulate The Algorithm and impact how users behave. And, in my experience, the majority of these companies cannot do that. The companies that own the algorithms can barely do that! This was my gripe with all the Cambridge Analytica stuff back in 2018. Is it creepy that these companies exist? Yes. Is it hilariously lame that Geese’s label or whoever hired Chaotic Good? Oh, yeah, one of the lamest things I’ve heard in a long time. That’s the real scandal, if you ask me lol. But at no point did WIRED ask Chaotic Good for proof that any of this even works. There are no links to the accounts Chaotic Good is operating, no examples of them successfully hijacking video platforms, no metrics that prove their alleged army of Geese video clippers have accomplished anything at all. Across all the reports on Chaotic Good, the only firm example I’ve found of anything they’ve done is from this Billboard interview from March. The company’s founders bragged that they were able to get Yellowjackets fans to make “40,000 creates” featuring a song from folk musician Kevin Atwater. Very cool! I’ve never heard of him. Seems like it worked.

Social media analyst Rachel Karten managed to find three TikTok accounts that appear to be affiliated with Chaotic Good and, uh, lol, they’re so bad I’m not even sure how to describe them. The biggest one, @.andrewdd, has around 64,000 followers and has had a couple big hits, but some of their videos have a few hundred views. The other two, @chalanttwin47 and @iholdyourwarmth, both have a few thousand followers. All three make the same kind of videos: a young person staring into a camera with A Softer World-style relatable text written over their faces and a popular song set as the audio. Another X user found more TikTok accounts that appear to be associated with Chaotic Good posting the same kind of videos with similarly low view counts.

The Chaotic Good sales pitch set off a lot of alarm bells for me because Garbage Day’s head of research Adam Bumas and I have spent years tracking how music streaming charts interact with social platforms in our monthly trend reports. 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. Whether we’re talking about livestreams, podcasts, or albums. The derivative clips and social posts live almost exclusively downstream of the original work, in terms of views, money, and influence. The metaphor I use is online platforms are furnaces and short form video is the kindling you burn between larger logs of content.

There are examples of artists using TikTok to influence Spotify streams. The best case studies are natives to the platform, like PinkPantheress and Doechii, whose unreleased track “Anxiety” got a full rollout last year after it was unearthed by fans on TikTok. The success of “Steve’s Lava Chicken” shows that songs that do well on TikTok are definitely influencing the charts, even if they’d never play on the radio. But unlike all these cases, 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.

Incidentally, the only person I’ve ever seen successfully pull off what Chaotic Good currently sells to artists like Geese and Sombr is Andrew Tate, back in 2022. It’s been forgotten after hundreds of subsequent controversies, but he blew up on TikTok during the pandemic because his fans, who paid to be in his fan club, Hustler’s University, could earn benefits by flooding TikTok with clips from his podcast. This seemed to convince TikTok’s algorithm that “Andrew Tate” was a trend that users were participating in and started recommending it to other users. But that took thousands and thousands of pieces of incendiary video content pushed for years by true believers. No one person or brand has really been able to pull off the same trick since. Almost certainly because TikTok doesn’t want that to happen again.

So yes, it’s harder than ever for a musician — or any creator — to break through right now. Algorithmic video platforms act as extremely intense gatekeepers and require a punishing amount of content from their users. And there are ways to cheat. You can hire clippers and shadowy marketing firms and bot farms, but everything that emerges from the internet that way has the same stink on it. You know it when you see it. An unmistakable meme-y-ness that reeks of inauthenticity. And while I don’t particularly like Geese, they don’t have it. It’s much more likely they got popular the way many bands do! They wrote some songs people like and have rich enough parents to have had the support needed to focus on writing more of them.

Adam Bumas contributed reporting to this piece.