It Feels Like The Entirety of the Music Industry is Now Fraudulent

Random Notes 107 Comments


Some will read the headline and say, “Come on. This is ridiculous and alarmist.” Others will say, “Well of course it is. You’ve been reporting on this stuff for going on two decades. Aren’t you being a master of the obvious?”

But over the last year or so, the game has shifted, and dramatically, and perhaps, catastrophically, especially for the artists who don’t have the financial resources to play it. Is saying that the entire music industry is fraudulent being a bit hyperbolic? Maybe. But maybe not. Sure, there are still artists and labels and managers out there doing things the right way and above board. Some of them are even breaking through and succeeding despite not participating in the fraudulent aspects of the industry.

But their numbers are dramatically diminishing, and their success is becoming less likely as increasingly you only have one real choice: play the game, or fail. As the old NASCAR saying goes, “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.” And meanwhile, the amount of new artists actually breaking through in music is dramatically down, thanks in part to the financial burden of entry it takes, and the distrust the public has of the industry, resulting in listeners relying more on older, catalog artists for their music consumption.

Every day you could write yet another story about how some piece of corruption has been exposed, another artist that broke out did so by gaming TikTok, and another artist had their identity stolen by AI. But in truth, you’re just scratching the surface, and simply giving illustrations of much bigger systemic problems, while it still feels imperative to report on the music being released from artists with integrity unwilling to play the corrupt game as opposed to only focusing on exposing the hype.

What’s inspired the latest round of worry that the entirety of the music business might be governed by corruption is a report in Wired talking about the rock band Geese, their 2025 album Getting Killed, and the recent accusations of them being an “industry plant,” or at least the benefactor of market manipulations being true.

But it’s not really Wired’s reporting that exposed what was happening, even though that’s the article that went viral. It was a Billboard interview with two guys named Andrew Spelman and Jesse Coren at SXSW who have a digital music marketing company called Chaotic Good. In the interview they proudly spilled the beans about what they call the practice of “tend simulation,” bragging, “We know how to go viral. We have thousands of pages.”

Long story short, Chaotic Good is one of the many companies out there that uses TikTok influencers and thousands of fake fan accounts to launch artists by placing songs in the backgrounds of viral videos, for the right price of course. Frankly, this is nothing new, nor is artists, management, and labels paying for TikTok virality, or any other kind of promotion beyond the conventional publicist who artists and labels used to pay to work with reputable media outlets to feature artists and their music.

Earlier this year, Saving Country Music exposed how media outlets such as Holler and Whiskey Riff were charging for coverage. But again, this is just barely the tip of the iceberg. In these instances, some love to cite the old radio practice of “payola,” meaning paying radio stations and DJs to play songs. But when it comes to payola, there are actually laws governing this practice, and heavy fines and penalties if radio stations are found to be engaging in it. On social media and TikTok, it’s the wild west.

The braggadocios nature of the Chaotic Good founders who inadvertently exposed Geese as getting goosed by a social media campaigns parallels the same cavalier attitude of another company called WtrCoolr who spilled the beans on how they spread a fictional story about how Dolly Parton was Shaboozey’s Godmother in a way that helped send Shaboozy’s massive hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” into the stratosphere.

These companies are acting with such impunity and in an open-faced manner by turning around and bragging about it because it’s an environment with little or no consequences. Some, if not many of the artists employing these types of tactics don’t even know what’s going on. It’s being employed, if not mandated by their labels or managers. The performers are just going with the flow, and glad anyone real is actually paying attention, however that attention was garnered.

But these practices dramatically raise the burden of entry for artists into music. To get the deals, you need followers. To get followers, you need capital to pay companies like Chaotic Good. To get the capital, you need a label or backers. It becomes a self-licking ice cream cone where people standing on the outside looking in don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to break through, which is the reason only about half as many artists are breaking through in music at the moment than were before the pandemic and the proliferation of TikTok.

Meanwhile, you have to take the accusations from a recent lawsuit against Spotify accusing the Canadian rapper Drake of being the beneficiary of “billions” of fake streams seriously. We know streaming fraud is likely just as rampant as underhanded TikTok campaigns. We just don’t know how rampant it is. How much can you trust those Spotify streaming stats? Is it all propped up via paid-for streams? Is that one of the reasons if feels like bad music rises, and the best stuff gets squashed?

Ironically, the crackdown on streaming fraud isn’t affecting artists like Drake, or Geese, or Shaboozey, who have big teams who can make any problems or accusations go away. Who is getting hit the hardest in crackdowns on illegal streaming are completely independent artists with no labels, or managers, and meager budgets who are getting swept up in streaming fraud crackdowns inadvertently, and have little or no recourse to resolve it.

That doesn’t mean breaking through organically is impossible. Though the accusations against Oliver Anthony and his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” being the result of market manipulation and Anthony being an “industry plant” were rampant, those accusations have never bore any fruit. It actually was a tuly organic moment.

But as the story of Geese being an “industry plant” continues to go viral, you’re seeing a significant amount of sympathy for them, or at least excusing of it, and from folks that you might think would be opposed to these kinds of underhanded market manipulations.

“Wild to see how many people didn’t know how social media-based marketing works,” says NPR’s Ann K. Powers. “The point of that Geese expose is in the last paragraph when the artist who ‘exposed’ the marketing plan said she’d do it too. Fair to not approve but don’t be shocked…”

But the reason people are shocked or having a visceral reaction to the Geese story is because all of this stuff is being done so surreptitiously. And no, it doesn’t feel the same as hiring a legitimate publicist who then persuades a third-party journalist to write about them. As guitar player and producer Sadler Vaden said in response to the controversy, “Here’s a mind blowing concept, Geese is awesome. Be awesome, play awesome music, spend money on an awesome publicist. Crazy!!”

What companies like Chaotic Good are doing—as well as big social media accounts who take payment for promoting artists—is presenting the specter of organic virality and reach, when in reality it’s paid-for. When a consumer reads a puff piece on a performer in Rolling Stone or GQ, they know the game, and can measure the information to come to their own conclusions. When it simply appears there’s dozens of average fans buzzing over a band—but those aren’t actually fans, their fictionalized bots bought to push a narrative—it’s the gaming of the mind.

What these companies and bands are doing is exploiting the very last bastion of creating a sustainable career without the help of the industry, which is cultivating a grassroots following. Manufacturing these grassroots fugazis is much more sinister because it undercuts the effectiveness of independent grassroots strategies that try to build fan bases up one fan and one human connection at a time.

Ultimately, just like you have with radio, there needs to be some sort of regulation, oversight, or at least, transparency when people are being paid to promote an artist or band. That doesn’t mean there aren’t still loopholes in the radio system regulated by the FCC. Label reps can still take radio programmers out for steak dinners and cultivate relationships that result in favorable outcomes, similar to publicists in print or even social media.

Is there any hope that some sort of regulatory oversight will be enacted over TikTok, illegal streaming activity, and other market manipulations in music? Of course not, at least not in the near term. There are too many other dilemmas and pots boiling over for the government to even identify the problem, let alone address it.

But what the entire music industry is doing by either turning a blind eye to it, or outright exploiting it, or even making excuses for it as we’ve seen a strange amount of when it comes to the example of Geese, is their undermining the integrity and public trust of the entire music industry.

Whether the entire music industry is fraudulent or not, increasingly the perception in the mind of consumers is that it is. They don’t trust the viral song, the viral moment, or the viral artist. They just assume everything is part of a corrupt scheme. That cynical, distrusting posture is why consumers are turning more and more to back catalog listening as opposed to supporting new, up-and-coming artists, ironically making these new artists have to rely even more on boosted exposure on social media.

The short-term gains of relying on TikTok virality and manipulations are already resulting in a long-term undermining of the industry itself. So when will the powers that be at the major labels, and organizations like the Recording Academy and RIAA step up to put new rules in place, petition the government to offer more regulation and transparency, and clean up the system before there’s no system left, and it’s simply the most monied interest in music that make it, and everyone else is left feeding off the scraps?

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