Did you feel more FOMO than usual about last year’s Glastonbury? Did a video of Overmono, Lorde, or Self Esteem make you green with envy? That might be because more of your friends actually went to the festival last year – or it could be because those acts, along with 25 others like Fatboy Slim, Charli xcx, and Doechii, paid a digital marketing agency to send influencers and content creators to watch their sets and post clips that looked organic on social media.
Take a quick look at Your Culture’s Instagram page, and you’ll see that this small UK agency helped spread some of 2025’s most viral live music moments: The Last Dinner Party’s wild “medieval sleaze” album launch party, and Chappell Roan’s headline set at Reading Festival. If you saw video of Calum Scott’s surprise set at St Pancras International last year, or Alex Warren’s outside Warren Street, it’s likely because of Your Culture. An Instagram post from January boasts that the brand “worked with 55% of the nominees” for the most recent Brit Awards.
It’s long been known that political parties and A-list actors use social media to create fake buzz. Music fans might expect that from mainstream pop stars – but not so much in indie music, where people still hope online chatter comes from real fans.
That illusion was shattered earlier this month when Reddit users and musician Eliza McLamb highlighted a recent Billboard interview with Chaotic Good Projects, a marketing company that specializes in spreading music on TikTok. Chaotic Good’s roster includes many of 2025’s biggest breakout acts, like Geese and their frontman Cameron Winter’s solo project, plus Sombr, Warren, Oklou, Zara Larsson, Mk.gee, and Dijon.
Chaotic Good uses several methods to create a positive vibe around an artist. There are narrative campaigns, which push a specific story about the artist by paying micro-influencers and music-discussion accounts to post about them. There are user-generated content campaigns, which use Chaotic Good’s network of affiliated influencers to share certain types of content set to specific songs by the artist. And there are fanpage campaigns, where Chaotic Good creates and runs social media accounts for fake fans of the artist. These accounts post a mix of content – like music video clips, concert footage, and posters for upcoming tours – all with captions praising how amazing the artist is, in a tone that feels young and enthusiastic.
Since the interview went viral, many of these artists have faced accusations that their success is manufactured, especially Geese and Winter. (Geese didn’t comment when contacted by the Guardian.) But according to multiple sources, this kind of marketing has been used by both indie and major label artists for a long time.
Other companies offering similar services include Byword, which promises campaigns “rooted in the marriage of contextualization and cross-pollination.” Its client list overlaps with Chaotic Good’s – including Oklou, Mk.gee, Geese, and Winter – and has also included Depeche Mode and Dominic Fike. There are also older, more influencer-focused agencies like Creed Media, which has been called “the agency behind some of the most viral songs on TikTok,” and Flighthouse, which works with musicians and film studios. There’s also an automated service called Floodify: for less than $200, artists can have their music placed on posts from hundreds or even thousands of TikTok accounts, many owned and run by Floodify, which set the music to viral – and usually boring – video formats like surreal AI “brainrot” animations or edits of YouTubers reacting to things.
It’s well known that major and indie labels often run fake fan pages for their artists.In some cases, like with former Fifth Harmony singer Normani, people have suggested that artists run their own fan pages (Normani never confirmed or denied this). Even unsigned artists do it: many sources I spoke to mentioned a manager who shared clips of a promising young artist through fake TikTok accounts to spark a bidding war between record labels, landing the artist a solid deal and a prime opening slot on one of the year’s biggest tours.
In many ways, this is one of the oldest tricks in music marketing—like a modern version of 20th-century payola, where labels paid radio DJs or record stores to push a single. Hype is rarely truly organic; it often comes from back-and-forth deals between publicists and editors, or agents and festival organizers. But the recent revelations have left many fans feeling tricked. Real Geese fan pages are buzzing with debates about whether the band’s success can still be seen as genuine. Meanwhile, listeners who were already skeptical of the hype around Geese and Winter are enjoying the “proof” that they were right. This somewhat over-the-top discussion shows that, even in the streaming era, fans saw indie music as a break from an increasingly corporate music world.
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Mk.gee performing in London in 2024. Photograph: Sonja Horsman/The Guardian
“I forgot that the average music fan doesn’t realize there are tons of companies doing this, and that it’s just part of a bigger marketing trend that’s been going on for a decade,” says Jack, a music manager who recently hired Chaotic Good to promote his artist (Jack asked to remain anonymous). Listeners are used to regular ads, he says, but for many, “the idea that you can create an atmosphere that subtly shapes people’s opinions feels like crossing a line. Even though every public figure who uses marketing does something similar.”
Jack’s attitude was: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Spending on things like Facebook and Instagram ads isn’t effective if competitors have “a million fan accounts working for them.” So he hired Chaotic Good to set up a few fake TikTok fan accounts, each posting videos three times a day, with the goal of “sparking discussion by planting specific stories”—in this case, that Jack’s artist is a top-tier songwriter, among other things. The package cost $2,000 (£1,490) a month with a minimum nine-month contract, according to a marketing document seen by the Guardian. But after Chaotic Good bragged about creating viral buzz in its Billboard interview, Jack started worrying that it “could overshadow all the hard work the artists I work with have been doing, just because we decided to mess around a bit on TikTok.”
Your Culture’s creator marketing service is different: the agency sends a set number of real TikTok creators to a gig to post positive content about it, charging clients £200 each, sometimes with a minimum spend of £2,000. Laura, a marketing professional who has worked with major labels and indie artists, and who also asked to remain anonymous, says this can be “a gamble” because clients can’t choose which creators attend each show—meaning “they’re not necessarily genuine fans, and their viewers aren’t necessarily going to be fans of what they’re posting.” In Laura’s experience, Your Culture’s service is useful “if you’re trying to show that a band is having a moment,” but it can also feel “like just checking a box.”
It’s also unclear whether these campaigns are strictly legal in the UK. The Federal Trade Commission has deemed this kind of marketing legal in the US, but according to the UK Competition and Markets Authority, any time a social media creator has been “paid or incentivized to promote, endorse, or review a product,” they must clearlyThis content is labeled as an advertisement. However, the guidance for creators is mainly about endorsing products like clothing or cleaning items, which doesn’t really apply to what agencies like Your Culture and Chaotic Good do.
When a song by one of her management clients started getting popular on TikTok, artist manager Anna (not her real name) hired Chaotic Good to create more content around it. It was a user-generated content campaign, so Chaotic Good reached out to people who run meme pages, song-lyric accounts, and those who post TV and movie montages, paying them to use her client’s song in their posts. Anna says working with these agencies only makes sense if there’s already organic buzz, but that makes it hard to measure real results. Her artist’s song numbers went up, “but I don’t know if that’s because of them or just the natural path the song was on.”
(Image: Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman from Chaotic Good speaking at SXSW in Austin, Texas, in March. Photo: Billboard/Getty Images)
She says agencies like Chaotic Good give “the illusion of really helping,” when in reality, “all of these things are kind of a complete hoax.” What works on TikTok changes every week. “No one actually knows the answer, so it’s just people who are really good at pretending they do. I think they’d admit that themselves.” (Chaotic Good, Your Culture, and Byword didn’t respond to repeated interview requests from the Guardian.)
Before the backlash, the fact that indie artists were using these services made other managers and labels nervous, so they started hiring them too. Jane, an executive at a mid-sized indie label who also asked to remain anonymous, says that last summer, when the hype around Geese and Winter was growing, managers she worked with started worrying they needed to hire agencies like Chaotic Good. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, is this the new standard?'” Jane says she was shocked to learn indie artists were using these services, thinking her peers followed “this unspoken code of ethics where we don’t use the same shady marketing tactics as major labels.”
There’s a fragile, house-of-cards feel to all these campaigns. Traditional print or digital ads, and even social media ads, have been losing effectiveness for a while. But streaming audiences keep growing, so there’s marketing money to spend, and a few companies with vague promises of “narrativisation” and “organic growth” have stepped in to fill the gap. But Geese were already popular before they hired Chaotic Good, and social media buzz wasn’t what made critic-driven outlets like Stereogum and the New Yorker name their 2025 album Getting Killed the best of the year. A few extra TikTok clips of Chappell Roan don’t change the fact that she’s one of the biggest artists of her generation, mainly because of her songwriting and stage presence. However, recent weeks have shown that these campaigns can cause real harm: no amount of marketing can buy a genuine fan connection—as opposed to just grabbing “lean-back” listeners—and it’s the genuine fans who now feel betrayed.
(Image: Alex Warren performing in London earlier this month. Photo: Jim Dyson/Getty Images)
According to Jack, in many cases, artists—busy writing music and touring—don’t realize where their marketing budget is going. To him, it’s all part of the murky ethics of working in today’s music industry, no different from sharing music on Spotify, a platform often criticized for low royalty rates or for previously running recruitment ads for ICE. “It’s the same kind of moral dilemma.”
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Anton Teichmann, a Berlin-based manager and founder of the indie label Mansions and Millions—which represents artists like Discovery Zone and Sean Nicholas Savage—argues that relying on these agencies shows how the music industry shuts out artists without big budgets. In a widely shared Instagram post, Teichmann wrote, “The same few platforms now control access to audiences, and of course they want to charge anyone trying to break through that barrier.”
Now that organizations like Chaotic Good claim to drive music discovery—instead of community-based underground scenes—Teichmann says, “Even as a small indie label, I have to compete in the same arena as big pop artists, whether I like it or not. We need more transparency about how these things work, because we’re told it’s a level playing field, but it’s not.”
Laura, however, doubts whether this kind of marketing even works. “The interesting thing about Geese is that their streaming numbers are actually quite low,” she says. “Given how much people are talking about them right now, you’d expect those numbers to be much higher. I wonder if some of the hype is inflated.” Anna and Jack insist that these campaigns only work if fans already like your artist to some degree. “You can’t create a moment out of nothing,” Anna says.
Even so, the Chaotic Good controversy has made loyal fans suspicious, and they’ll likely question how genuine the success of their favorite “indie” artist really is going forward. Jack says the backlash also highlights an ugly truth: it seems like everyone is trying to manipulate the algorithm these days. Maybe people should have realized this sooner, he adds. “I’m also thinking, ‘most of the internet is bullshit.’ Maybe people needed to wake up.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about the infiltration of fake fans and cynical viral marketing in Indie music written in a natural conversational tone with clear direct answers
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 Wait what do you mean by fake fans
Answer Real fans love the music and the artist Fake fans are bots or paid accounts that stream a song follow an artist or post comments to make a track look more popular than it really is They dont actually listen or care
2 How does cynical viral marketing work in indie music
Answer Its when a label or artist creates a fake organic momentlike a staged random street performance a manufactured beef with another artist or a weird TikTok challengejust to get clicks not because they have a genuine song to share
3 Is this a new problem
Answer No but its gotten much worse since streaming and TikTok became the main way people find music It used to be about payola at radio now its about buying streams and faking virality
4 Why would anyone bother to fake fans Doesnt it hurt the artist
Answer Shortterm it tricks algorithms and playlist curators A song with 100000 fake streams might get added to a real playlist which then gets real listens Longterm it hurts because the artist builds a career on a lie not on actual fans
5 How can I tell if an indie artist has real or fake fans
Answer Look at the comments If a song has millions of streams but only 10 generic comments like or underrated its a red flag Real fans talk about specific lyrics live shows or memories connected to the song
AdvancedLevel Questions
6 Are there specific cynical viral marketing tactics that are most damaging
Answer Yes the most damaging is astroturfing on Reddit and Discord Labels pay people to post as real fans saying I just found this unknown gem in indie music subreddits Another is comment planting on TikTok where paid accounts leave fake emotional stories under a video to make it go viral
7 How deep does the fake streaming economy go
