If you’re into rock, you’ve probably heard of the band Geese.
The Brooklyn-based band has been garnering critical acclaim and main focus with regular comparisons to long-time legendary bands such as The Strokes. However, over the past year there has been a meteoric rise in their popularity. The band’s fourth studio album, To be killeddropped at the end of September and was named the best of 2025 The New Yorker in December. They made their musical guest debut on Saturday Night Live in January of this year and played Coachella this past weekend.
Now, a viral Substack article and the following Narrative The report pointed out that the social media buzz around Geese wasn’t entirely organic.
At the center of the controversy is Chaotic Good Projects, a relatively new boutique digital marketing agency that creates user-generated content (UGC) and other marketing campaigns for musicians.
“We study the internet and TikTok and see what works organically and try to recreate it on an inorganic scale,” said Andrew Spelman, co-founder of Chaotic Good. Billboard in an interview last month. “TikTok is built entirely on trending audio… a big part of what we do is put enough volume between enough impressions and enough accounts to try to simulate the idea that a song is trending or moving.”
Co-founder Jesse Coren said in the same interview that the accounts are managed by “a large network of both employees and contractors.”
“Our office is full of iPhones,” Spelman said.
The company’s other co-founder, Adam Tarsia, confirmed to WIRED on Tuesday that they are indeed developing a campaign for Geese on TikTok.
The Gases are far from the only group Chaotic Good has worked with. The agency has recently handled marketing campaigns for artists such as Alex Warren, Zara Larsson and Sombr, as well as established artists such as Tame Impala, Coldplay, Justin Bieber and Dua Lipa.
But the geese are getting a significant amount of the online push for it because they were already the subject of industrial plant rumors. The band’s sudden rise in popularity had already led many online critics to speculate that the internet buzz they were getting wasn’t entirely organic, and perhaps instead was driven by industry backers such as labels or marketing agencies.
It wouldn’t be fair to single out Chaotic Good as the only company that puts out fake fan content to boost their customers’ popularity. These social media tactics have become the name of the game in the music industry, leading to a fair amount of controversy over many other controversially dishonest, alleged practices over the past year. For example, hit with Spotify class action lawsuit late last year accused the streamer of “deceptive business practices” over its Discovery Mode feature, which gives users personalized recommendations based on their music tastes but allows artists to pay their own way. Meanwhile, Drake In January, it faced a class action lawsuit for allegedly using bots to artificially inflate its streaming numbers.
UGC strategies are used by labels and marketing agencies, large and small, to create buzz and the illusion of a fanbase for their clients in hopes of building a real fanbase. These teams often have fake fan accounts that “leak” new music, post fan edits of popular movies and TV shows for their clients’ songs, or pay other influencers with large followings to use the songs in videos or ads.
The tactics can create a sense of dishonesty and leave some fans and smaller artists feeling cheated. But their pervasiveness proves the power that the TikTok algorithm holds in our society and, in turn, the influence that people skilled at gaming social media algorithms can wield.
While UGC is booming in music, so are other industries. The 2024 presidential election was just one example about the increasing dominance of UGC campaigns in political campaigns, similar to those used by the music industry.
With AI-generated content hitting like a tsunami this year, expect fans of your newest obsession to be less organic than ever.
