Songs in the Key of Lie
· The Atlantic
You’re scrolling TikTok, 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.
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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’s success was a “psyop.” That article caused its own controversy: People really do love Geese’s wild-eyed, rawly thrashing music, and now they’re being told they’ve somehow been duped.
Defending Chaotic Good’s practices to Billboard, Coren quoted a belief of Spelman’s: “Everything on the internet is fake.” Indeed, though trend simulation is recently ascendant in the record industry, it’s also just a variation of what’s come before. Guerilla marketing and astroturfing were notorious advertising strategies decades ago. Bots, opaque algorithms, and AI deepfakes have since pushed society into what pundits call the “post-truth era.” Music was never going to be exempt from our civilizational drought of trust.
But trend simulation can’t simply be shrugged off as a sign of the times. Rather, it—and its backlash—could mark an end point of a cultural cycle that’s been running at least since the advent of TikTok. Music has survived crises of credibility before—and it’s well past time to revise what realness means today.
In a 1993 article for The Atlantic, the classical composer David Schiff relayed the perplexing lessons he’d learned teaching a music-history class at Reed College. He asked his students to listen to a range of artists, including the Beatles, Luciano Berio, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Whether discussing opera or pop, the students all seemed to use the same criteria: “They were constantly on guard against the phony, the spurious, the commercial,” Schiff wrote, because “they wanted to believe that the music connected them to another human being rather than just to a creature of marketing.”
His students weren’t unusual in this. Authenticity is the prime lens through which lots of people evaluate music, even though—as music critics love to point out—the ensuing judgments can seem incoherent. Bob Dylan’s creaky voice gets touted as the pinnacle of real, but his songs and statements are filled with fabrications. The precise qualities that make Taylor Swift so relatable to many listeners seem totally calculated to others. Schiff was amused that his largely white, middle-class students deemed N.W.A a truthful take on rap, and MC Hammer false—how could they possibly judge that? All of these examples show that authenticity is a shorthand for something more complex.
Scholars like to debate whether a fixation upon identity and intention is an intrinsic part of art appreciation, or whether it’s something more modern. Some of Shakespeare’s plays were published without his name attached. Folk songs that circulated for centuries all over the world had no one “author.” But in the modern era, some feeling of realness and human touch has become central to most discussions of art.
In 1935, the critic Walter Benjamin famously offered an explanation: When mechanical reproduction (such as recordings and prints) allowed for the mass distribution of what had previously been place-and-time-bound work, it deprived art of its “aura” of originality. Chaotic Good’s techniques suggest that another factor is at play: social context and narrative. How and why a work reaches an audience is inextricable from the audience’s attitudes toward a work. Knowing that the music you’re hearing matters to other people, especially if they’re people who seem to be peers, can have a powerful effect.
Marketers have long understood this. Nineteenth-century opera houses paid troupes of people—called “the claque”—to applaud where the audience might otherwise not. In the early days of popular music, Tin Pan Alley’s publishing houses employed “pluggers”: musicians who played their employers’ songs in public, at any opportunity, in order to get people to buy sheet music. A 1930 book about the music industry informs readers that most every song they hear in public is “the result of a huge plot—involving thousands of dollars and thousands of organized agents—to make you hear, remember and purchase.”
But when marketing efforts become too obvious, music itself—and the public’s taste—tends to change in defiance. Gustav Mahler banned claques from his performances as part of an effort to revolutionize opera and symphonic music, turning them into the serious art forms they’re considered today. Tin Pan Alley—and its assembly-line approach to hitmaking—saw its relevance wane under competition from the rawer sounds of rock and roll. And in the 1950s, early rock’s reputation took a blow after it came to light that rock labels had been bribing—or giving “payola” to—radio DJs.
The evolution of cool has long tracked this cat-and-mouse game between the record industry and audiences. The public may not be tuned into the specifics of the exact marketing strategies helping propel any given musical movement, but we all intuit when innovation congeals into cliché and genuine sentiment into sap—and we all have some sense of how money feeds those processes. Bigotry famously played a role in the “Disco sucks” backlash of the late 1970s, but so did exhaustion with the record industry for propping up a craze that would otherwise have died down. Labels were churning out gimmicky singles such as “Disco Duck,” all but inviting jaded listeners to pick up a baseball bat and smash some records.
The internet era has already seen the rise and fall of a number of marketing-and-music waves (see: blog-hyped indie rock or the corporate empowerment anthems of the Obama era). Sometime in the mid-to-late 2010s, pop entered the place it’s been stuck for a while: a “lowercase” era defined by an intimate, tossed-off sensibility. Think of the confessional lyricism of Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Zach Bryan, and Noah Kahan. Think of Charli XCX’s confidently apathetic attitude. Think of rappers such as Playboi Carti dropping shaggily edited albums without warning. And think about how these artists have harnessed TikTok, which created a global network of everyday people performing and chatting from car seats and couches.
Lowercase pop originally cut against the polished trends of the early 2010s: the filtered aesthetic of Instagram, the thirsty hashtags of Twitter, the highly produced spectacles created by Beyoncé, Ye, and Lady Gaga. It matched real-world lifestyle shifts toward social isolation and phone addiction, and it suggested a comforting idea: Life lived through screens could be as real—maybe realer—than the real thing.
This idea is exactly what trend simulation has taken advantage of. In one video with more than 800,000 views by a poster who previously listed a Chaotic Good email in her profile (though now it just reads “dm for promo”), a girl in a scarf sits pensively on a train. The text reads, “The more you love someone, the sleepier you are around them.” A folk singer mewls in the background. Cozy and DIY-seeming, the video is a perfect distillation of the lowercase sensibility. If you click on the link to the audio, you find that it soundtracks many suspiciously similar clips of young faces and twee aphorisms.
In the Billboard interview, Chaotic Good’s Spelman took credit for popularizing this kind of video. He called it “pastel talk” and said it was perfect for promoting singer-songwriters. Other genres require other approaches. For hip-hop, he said, slowed-down snippets of music over clips from video games work well. For country, you want images of cowboy hats and trucks. Competitor firms use slightly varied tactics: Floodify automates the posting of meme-like videos for a fee; Hundred Days specializes in circulating interview and performance clips.
What unites these approaches isn’t simply their simulated authenticity. It’s that they take for granted ways of engaging with music: as a wallpaper for life’s intimate moments, as a form of online social currency. They proceed from the shared sense that the internet is a real place filled with real people sharing how music shapes their real lives. They recognize the level of trust on which online culture currently operates, and they are exploiting it.
Still, it’s not clear how effective these campaigns have been. Trend simulation involves gaming the recommendation algorithms to make playcount metrics go up—and the algorithms keep changing in part to counteract such practices. And although TikTok has become integral to the music industry in recent years, the internet researcher Ryan Broderick reports that artists tend to go viral on platforms like it for an old-fashioned reason: The music is already popular among listeners. Chaotic Good seems to be trying to reverse that dynamic—but when Billboard’s Robinson asked if social-media virality always translates into more streams for a song, Chaotic Good’s Spelman said that sometimes, “there’s something irreducible about the song that people just don’t want to listen to.” In other words: Marketing can’t actually make you like bad music. It can just expose you to it.
But at a certain point, amplifying mediocrity on social platforms just undermines the whole system. Already, distrust for the internet has been growing amid latent panic over the hijacking of our attention spans. In music, rappers routinely accuse one another of juicing the charts with fake streams. AI has begun scrambling notions of authorship. And now, the remarkable amount of publicity and backlash that the Chaotic Good interview has generated will only worsen matters. Ask Milli Vanilli—the music-listening public doesn’t forget when it feels like it’s been lied to.
[Read: The attention-span panic]
That doesn’t mean trend-simulation tactics will cease to be used, or that all listeners will wisen up. But it does mean that social-media platforms will continue on their long journey into jankiness and uncoolness—and away from seeming like possible sources of authenticity. Music that caters to the sensibilities of TikTok will begin to seem as dated as the Bee Gees did in the early ’80s. Artists and audiences will, intuitively, begin to ask what real looks and feels like now.
What happens next is hard to say. I, for one, thought that Geese might represent an answer, as the band’s reckless intensity and inscrutable lyrics seemed to mock the inside-kid energy and tedious literalism of lowercase pop. The buzz it generated seemed like a hopeful sign that the next wave for music culture would involve noise, nonsense, and moshing together.
That very sense of excitement and exceptionality is why that particular band has become a flash point in the controversy over Chaotic Good. Some people always thought Geese was overhyped and now feel validated; others, like me, say we’re simply being reminded of the complex ways that music always travels. The band had been rising in the rock world for a while (in an email to Wired, one of Chaotic Good’s co-founders, Adam Tarsia, pointed out that Geese’s well-publicized debut came out four years before the firm was founded). Media write-ups, genuine word of mouth, and—no doubt—some behind-the-scenes shenanigans served to get Geese’s songs heard. But the thing that’s cool about music is that, even when you can trust little else, you can always trust your ears.