Songs in the Key of Lie

You’re scrolling Tik Tok, Instagram, or one of the many other apps where short-form video devours your time (maybe the app you use to order sushi). You come across a stranger doing something amusing while a song plays in the background. A few swipes later, you hear the song again. Now it’s in your head. Now it seems like an interesting part of the zeitgeist. You save the song to your phone. A question flashes through your mind: Did you just discover new music, or, through the dark arts of algorithmic manipulation, did the music industry just bait a new customer?Quite possibly the answer is the latter, in which case you’ve fallen prey to “trend simulation”: the marketing tactic of paying people online to post opinions they don’t necessarily hold, endorsing music they don’t necessarily care about, so as to trick social-media algorithms—and users—into regarding a band as more popular than it really is. The practice became a topic of controversy after a recent Billboard interview in which Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman, two of the founders of the marketing firm Chaotic Good Projects, bragged about their ability to make any musician go viral. They said they can get hundreds of accounts to rave about an SNL performance, or shape what’s being said in comment sections about an album. Spelman described music marketing as an “arms race” for “volume”: “One artist hires us and we run 20 pages for them,” he said. “Someone else will do 25.”Coren and Spelman were discussing the matter nonchalantly, but to many musicians and listeners, news of their tactics came as a depressing surprise. The firm, observers noted, has worked with established names (such as Justin Bieber and Dua Lipa), new stars (Alex Warren, Sombr), and indie darlings (Mk.Gee, Oklou). The singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb reacted to the interview with a viral Substack post attempting to map out Chaotic Good’s web of influence. A Wired headline zeroed in on the Chaotic Good client Geese to speculate that the young band’