chaotic good projects / fake fans / tiktok

Digital marketing firm Chaotic Good Projects confirmed it ran viral “trend simulation” campaigns for Brooklyn indie rock band Geese and for frontman Cameron Winter, after the group’s rapid rise in late 2025 sparked “industry plant” and “psyop” accusations. Geese’s fourth album, “Getting Killed,” released in late September 2025, topped year-end lists, helped sell out a fall tour, and led to high-profile bookings including Saturday Night Live and Coachella. In a late-March episode of Billboard’s “On the Record” podcast recorded at SXSW, cofounders Andrew Spelman and Jesse Coren described building networks of TikTok pages, seeding songs into videos, and sometimes fabricating interactions to boost algorithmic rankings. The issue resurfaced in early April after a viral Substack post by Eliza McLamb examined the ethics of such campaigns.

A music-marketing agency, Chaotic Good Projects, is using manufactured fan accounts and other paid tactics to create viral trajectories for artists, raising questions about authenticity in fandom and chart success. The author—an experienced musician—details how executives prefer controllable, contagious audience growth and cites high-profile clients like Alex Warren, Sombr, Dua Lipa, Shawn Mendes, and Justin Bieber as beneficiaries of such services. The piece highlights the tension between engineered virality (fake streams, bought attendance, seeded narratives) and the need for genuine, sustainable fan communities that support artists meaningfully. After publication, Chaotic Good altered its website, removing some campaign materials and artist references. The story matters because it exposes how platform-driven success can be manufactured, affecting music discovery, metrics integrity, and platform trust.

A Hacker News thread links to an article titled “Fake Fans” discussing modern payola and the rise of fabricated online engagement. Commenters note increasing fake TikTok comments and bots, emphasizing that authenticity—especially hyper-local, real-world presence—is becoming a scarce and valuable resource for creators. The thread highlights concern that algorithmic promotion can’t replicate genuine audience connection, and that many talented artists lack marketing skills to cultivate real fans. This matters for platforms, creators, and advertisers because fake engagement undermines recommendation systems, monetization, and trust, and may drive demand for verification, new detection tools, and business models that reward verifiable authenticity.

A Billboard profile revealed Chaotic Good Projects, a digital marketing agency that builds artificial virality for artists by manufacturing hundreds of fake fan accounts and engineering narratives to drive streams and visibility. Reporter Eliza McLamb investigates how such services are used by both algorithm-driven influencers (e.g., Alex Warren, Sombr) and top pop stars (Dua Lipa, Shawn Mendes, Justin Bieber) to seed momentum on platforms like TikTok, then questions what this means for authentic fandom and artists who rely on genuine engagement. The piece notes Chaotic Good subsequently scrubbed parts of its website, underscoring industry sensitivity. This matters because fabricated engagement distorts discovery, ad/streaming economies, and platform trust.