Congratulations, You've Been Marketed To Whether You Know It Or Not?

Geese's Coachella set was available livestream from home. Fans were thrilled when they broke into a fan-favorite cover of Justin Bieber's "Baby" during the breakdown of 3D Country opener "2122."

It's become a tradition for the band to slip in a cover, or a fragment of one, during that section.

The choice felt fitting. The song about young love also subtly connects Geese to Bieber in another way. Both are clients of the digital marketing agency Chaotic Good.

The Viral Essay That Changed the Conversation

Musician and cultural critic Eliza McLamb wrote a compelling story about Chaotic Good that went viral on Substack.

Her source was Billboard, which did an interview with the agency. During that time, they were quoted as saying, "Everything on the Internet is fake."

The reality? There's no denying the internet from even five years ago. Now, huge portions of it are covered in sock puppets, influence campaigns, and fake accounts trying to tilt sentiment. It's a new world where bots are sold to the highest bidders.

Inside the "Non-Marketing Machine

In the Billboard interview, Chaotic Good's core services were detailed. Their services include narrative campaigns, user-generated content, fan pages, and brand/media seeding.

All of their services are specifically designed to manufacture virality through decentralized, "non-marketing" marketing.

Chaotic Good obviously realized that sharing all of their services was a bad idea. Since the Billboard interview, the agency has removed its client list and "narrative campaign" section from its website.

When Attention Turns Away from the System

But in the wake of the essay's viral spread, the outrage hasn't been evenly distributed across the agency or its broader practices.

Instead, much of it has focused on Geese frontman Cameron Winter.

From "Psyops to Press Budgets

On April 14, Wired published John Semley's essay, "The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop," which pointed to the "back-room machinations" behind Geese's rise.

Those machinations turned out to be a standard marketing budget from a well-regarded independent label. If that qualifies as a "psyop," then nearly every successful artist is complicit in something similar.

Mainstream pop artists like Alex Warren and Sombr, who were also associated with Chaotic Good at the time of Billboard, Wired, and Eliza McLamb's Substack essays, already exist in a space where commercial machinery is assumed.

For them, marketing that floods comment sections or fuels meme accounts doesn't contradict their public image; it reinforces it.

Terms like "indie" and "alternative" have become increasingly unstable in the streaming era. Even when Spotify adds Sombr to playlists like "Indie Vibes," his career remains firmly within the mainstream economy.

What "Indie Even Means Now

Geese, by contrast, still fit the traditional "indie" profile. Signed to Partisan Records, they formed as teenagers, spent years playing basements, and built their sound through clear influences and deep musical study.

Their early records earned respect, but not the level of attention their 2025 breakthrough, Getting Killed, eventually brought. They toured with established acts like Vampire Weekend and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, steadily building before breaking through.

Even now, their scale remains modest compared to top-streaming pop acts.

Their monthly listeners sit under two million, strong for indie music, but far from the tens of millions reached by artists like Sombr or Alex Warren.

Authenticity vs. Infrastructure

To many listeners, this creates tension. A band like Geese appears to represent authenticity, while their association with a marketing agency built around engineered virality feels like a contradiction.

But as Wired's Semley notes, "there is sometimes a naive hope that 'indie artists' should be held to a different standard, pop stars do this sort of thing. It's expected."

He explained, "I receive between one and two hundred music PR emails a day, most from artists with far less visibility and budget than Geese. Almost all of them exist because someone paid for placement. That is the system."

Every press push, every mailing list inclusion, every "discovery" is the result of deliberate promotion. Music journalism is, in part, the process of sorting through those efforts.

The Rise of "Invisible Marketing

But direct-to-fan marketing operates differently. As Substack's McLamb writes, "SNL performances and favorable Pitchfork reviews don't move the needle. TikToks about these things do."

Visibility now depends less on traditional media and more on content that mimics organic fan behavior.

An anonymous digital marketing coordinator at a third-party agency similar to Chaotic Good spoke to McLamb. She confided that she works on campaigns involving both official and unofficial fan accounts, specifically designed to simulate organic engagement.

Does that shock you? It doesn't surprise me in the least. That is the world we live in now. Not just the Internet world, but we are constantly bombarded with marketing 24/7 on all our devices.

The anonymous marketing account manager confided, "If the copywriting sounds like promo, you've failed," she says. "You have to sound like a fan."

She studies real fan accounts to replicate tone. If she's posting for an artist like PinkPantheress or GloRilla, she won't write, "New merch available now." Instead, she'll write something like, "omg I neeeeed that crewneck."

She also stresses caution in sourcing material. Some "fan" accounts, she notes, are clearly operated by teams rather than fans, often posting exclusive footage that wouldn't realistically circulate outside official channels.

Scaling Virality

The scale of these campaigns varies widely. Artists like Geese, Dijon, Jane Remover, or Oklou might engage agencies for specific moments such as SNL performances, album cycles, or viral pushes.

Larger pop acts, however, may run continuous, multi-account strategies. She claimed that some major-label teams operate dozens of accounts per artist to saturate algorithms and mimic grassroots momentum.

In that ecosystem, authenticity becomes difficult to define. The line between fan behavior and marketing behavior blurs until it disappears entirely.

A teenager running a stan account and a marketing coordinator both speak the same visual language. One posts, "This song saved me." The other writes it on behalf of a brand strategy.

Fandom, Morality, and Backlash

This feedback loop has reshaped how fandom itself operates. Dislike is no longer just aesthetic; it often becomes moral. It isn't enough to say a song is bad. It has to signify something larger like in-authenticity, corruption, manipulation.

The Chaotic Good discourse allowed some critics of Geese to re-frame their dislike as vindication: they weren't just unimpressed; they had been right all along.

It echoes a familiar pattern. When allegations surface about a public figure, people often respond with "I never liked them anyway," as though hindsight confers moral clarity.

One comment in the Geese backlash even ended with "hope you get canceled," collapsing criticism into something more punitive than evaluative.

At some point, it raises a simpler question: when did "I don't like this" stop being enough?

The Myth of Pure Taste

The backlash was already forming before the viral essays were aired. In some ways, it was inevitable.

In the music industry, it's well known that no artist becomes widely visible without also becoming widely disliked. And for Geese specifically, there are understandable points of friction. There were questions of class, industry support, and the blurred line between perception and reality.

But there's something more fundamental underneath it. People want to believe their taste exists outside of influence. They want discovery to feel unmediated, almost accidental. It feels more meaningful to say you found something in a dusty record store than on an algorithmic feed. They also don't want to feel manipulated.

Still, the system is what it is. Marketing is embedded in every layer of music culture. The difference now is that it has learned to disguise itself as participation rather than marketing.

Maybe the answer isn't pretending it isn't there, but being honest about what we're actually responding to. And still making space for curiosity anyway.

The Scene Beneath the Discourse

In some marketing campaigns, Geese is known as the "saviors of rock." This upsets fans. Not because they aren't good, but because they're one of many good bands in a much larger ecosystem. Who has the authority to determine that they are special?

New York's indie scene is jam-packed with musicians doing meaningful work in obscurity, despite rising costs and shrinking attention spans.

If anything, the most interesting music often exists just outside visibility where it's completey unoptimized, unboosted, and untracked.

The problem with glossy marketing campaigns is that they aren't right. If they are subtle, fans may not realize they are being manipulated by fake influencers.

When that happens, it reframes a trusted system into a music industry scandal.

Most people outside the industry don't understand that there has never been a clear divide between music and marketing. In the past, the marketing was not allowed to be visible to protect fans. Now there is a clear connection, and some fans are

So yes, Geese are being marketed. So is everyone else.

The only real question is whether the music holds up once you stop looking for the machinery behind it.