In March, two of the co-founders of digital marketing agency Chaotic Good sat down for a live podcast recording with the music trade publication Billboard to discuss their company’s strategies for making songs go viral. Their approach, they explained, is designed to manipulate social media algorithms using thousands of fake accounts. They specialise in “trend simulation” — creating hundreds of posts, with tracks by their clients playing in the background, to manufacture the feeling that a song is everywhere.
This is also known as paid-for “user-generated content”, or UGC, and is increasingly common in today’s online media. “We can drive impressions on anything,” one of the co-founders explains in the podcast. “At this point, we know how to go viral.” Chaotic Good also runs what it calls “narrative campaigns”, where it purports to shape public sentiment around an artist by saturating algorithmic feeds and flooding comment sections with positive reactions. An artist playing on Saturday Night Live, for example, might hire the company to ensure that when clips from the performance are shared online, there will be hundreds of positive comments posted by Chaotic Good, perhaps from the large collection of phones in their office.
In a meta turn of events, this interview about virality has now gone viral after the musician Eliza McLamb wrote a newsletter drawing attention to Chaotic Good’s work for the Gen Z rock band Geese, whose popularity seemed to rise suddenly in the past year. According to Chaotic Good, it was hired to promote both performance footage and interview clips for the band. McLamb’s story was subsequently picked up by Wired, and much debate ensued. Some fans were shocked to learn that such tactics have been used not just to pump the popularity of major label Top 40 acts such as Alex Warren and Benson Boone, but also artists with deeper ties to independent culture. Others have expressed concern over the extent to which their music tastes are being shaped by algorithmic manipulation.