A marketing company just admitted to manufacturing virality for major artists. What does it mean for fans, and for the artists who refuse to play along?
At her computer somewhere in Stockholm, a teenager discovers a band. She hadn’t been looking. A video popped up on her For You Page, another user raving about this new artist in that raw, unfiltered way that feels authentic precisely because it doesn’t feel performed. She clicks. She listens. She tells her friends. The band, in her mind, belongs to her generation. It bubbled up from real people, real taste, real feeling.
Except the account that posted that video? It was created by a marketing agency. The “fan” was paid. The discovery was scripted. And the feeling of authenticity, that deep, irreproducible sensation that drives real fandom, was the product being sold.
This is the world that a company called Chaotic Good Projects helped build. And now that they’ve admitted it out loud, the music industry is facing more scrutiny of their marketing tactics.
Straight From The Horse’s Mouth: How to Fake Virality
In early 2026, Chaotic Good Projects co-founders Andrew Spelman and Jesse Coren sat down with Billboard and candidly described what they called “trend simulation»; a practice involving creating hundreds or thousands of fake accounts, flooding TikTok and Instagram Reels with videos soundtracked by their client’s music, and manufacturing the appearance of a grassroots moment. “We can drive impressions on anything at this point,” Spelman told the publication. “We know how to go viral. We have thousands of pages.”
Their client roster, as documented before the company quietly scrubbed their website, included some of the most critically celebrated artists of 2025: Geese, Cameron Winter, Mk.gee, Oklou, Zara Larsson, Dijon, and Sombr. The services on offer ranged from “narrative campaigns», paying micro-influencers to push a specific story about an artist, to “fanpage campaigns,” in which Chaotic Good creates and maintains entire fake fan accounts, posting clips, concert posters, and breathless captions in the voice of a devotee. One such package ran $2,000 a month, minimum nine-month commitment.
The exposé that truly broke the story came not from a major publication, but from a Substack post by musician Eliza McLamb, who noticed Chaotic Good’s fingerprints on artists she’d considered genuinely independent. Her essay went viral, ironically, in the organic way Chaotic Good only pretends to manufacture.
The fraud hiding in plain sight
Let’s be clear about what this is. When a major magazine runs a glowing profile of an artist, readers understand the game. Publicists pitch. Editors decide. A transaction of sorts has occurred, even if no money directly changed hands. The reader applies the appropriate filter.
Fake fan accounts operate on a different mechanism entirely. They exploit the one thing that social media still has that traditional media lost: the illusion of peer opinion. When you see dozens of seemingly ordinary users buzzing about a song, your brain registers it as social proof; real people, real enthusiasm, real taste-making. That illusion is the product Chaotic Good is selling. And it is, by design, indistinguishable from the real thing.
This is not a gray area. It is the gaming of human psychology at scale, dressed up in the language of “narrative” and “UGC campaigns.” Other firms offering similar services have their own euphemisms; one promises campaigns “rooted in the marriage of contextualisation and cross-pollination.” The vocabulary shifts; the deception doesn’t.
A system that dials down integrity
It would be easy to condemn the artists who use these services. It is also insufficient. The deeper problem is structural: organic reach on social media platforms has been so systematically throttled that genuine promotion has become nearly impossible without paying someone to game the algorithm. As one music executive put it, everyone started asking, “Is this the new baseline?”
Traditional gatekeepers; the Pitchfork review, the SNL performance, the Rolling Stone cover, no longer move the needle the way they once did. TikToks about those things do. And so an industry that once required quality plus connections now requires quality plus an algorithmic insurgency that most artists simply cannot afford to mount alone.
The cruelest irony is that this system is most punishing to the artists who can least afford to play. Independent musicians, artists from working-class backgrounds etc. who lack the financial runway to sustain a nine-month, $18,000 fake-fan campaign — they are competing, invisibly and unknowingly, against an engineered illusion. The baseline was always unfair. Now it is manufactured to look organic. Many are starting to make the argument that the privileged are taking over the arts.
“The industry has changed. ‘Being heard’ is not just about putting out music or even promoting it. The gatekeepers hardly matter anymore. SNL performances and favorable Pitchfork reviews don’t move the needle — TikToks about those things do.”
— Eliza McLamb, musician.
Nothing New Under The Sun
The defenders of these practices are quick to reach for history: Frank Sinatra’s publicist paid teenagers to scream at concerts in the 1940s. Radio payola scandals rocked the industry in the 1950s. Streaming farms have been gaming charts for a decade. Music promotion has always involved some degree of manufactured momentum.
This is true, and it matters. But it is also a rhetorical trap. “It has always been done” is not a moral argument; it is a description of persistence. The reason these revelations still land with such force, the reason McLamb’s essay spread the way it did, is that something has changed in degree, even if not in kind.
What changed is intimacy. Fake fan accounts do not just simulate a crowd; they simulate friendship. They replicate the specific texture of peer recommendation; the friend who texts you a link, the classmate who plays you something on their phone. That register of communication is the last redoubt of trust in an age of advertising saturation. To colonise it is to hollow out the one space where discovery still felt genuinely human.
The Real Thing
Here is the thing that the Chaotic Good model cannot replicate: longevity. A fake fan does not buy a ticket. A manufactured moment does not build a community. Trend simulation can create a chart position. It cannot create a sold-out arena three albums later.
The artists with the deepest, most durable careers have almost always built them the same way: by treating fans not as a target demographic but as the people most worth their time. The mechanisms for doing this have changed, but the principle has not.
What genuine artist-fan connection looks like note for note:
- Showing up in comments, replies, and DMs, not through a social media manager, but personally. Fans can tell the difference, and it compounds over time.
- Direct-to-fan communication channel — email newsletters, Discord communities, Patreon, existing outside the algorithm entirely. Platforms change. A real artist to fan connection doesn’t.
- Sharing process, not just product. Fans who watch an album in construction feel ownership over it. That ownership turns listeners into advocates.
- Being honest about failure and uncertainty. In an era of polished personas, vulnerability is disarming. Artists who share the hard parts of the process earn a different quality of loyalty.
- Creating spaces where fans can find each other, because a community around an artist that has its own internal social gravity is virtually impossible to manufacture and impossible to buy.
- Rewarding long-term fans with access, not just transactions: early tickets, exclusive content, the feeling of being known rather than marketed at.
None of this is glamorous. None of it goes viral. But it compounds. The artists who have survived format shifts, industry upheavals, and the collapse of album sales, the ones still filling rooms twenty years in, almost universally describe the same thing: they built something real with real people, and that thing became self-sustaining.
A fake fanpage can generate impressions. It cannot generate the moment a stranger recognises a lyric on a stranger’s t-shirt and they both feel part of the same tribe. That moment is what music is actually for. And it is the one thing that no marketing agency, however good, has ever figured out how to sell.
Fast Forward
Chaotic Good’s post-Billboard silence, and their rapid website cleanup, suggests they understood, belatedly, that bragging about psychological manipulation is a different thing from quietly practising it. The conversation they inadvertently started is valuable, but it needs to go further than a single news cycle.
Platforms bear responsibility here too. TikTok and Instagram have the data to identify coordinated inauthentic behaviour at scale, and they choose, largely, not to act on it when it drives engagement (and revenue). Listeners deserve transparency about what they are engaging with. And the industry, at every level, needs to reckon with what it has normalized in the name of “growth.”
For the artists themselves, the choice is a genuinely difficult one. Opting out of these services in a market where your competitors are using them is a real sacrifice. But it is also, over a long enough timeline, an advantage. The fan who found you through a fake account will leave when the algorithm serves them someone else. The fan who found you because your music reached them, really reached them, is a different kind of asset entirely. They are, in the most literal sense, irreplaceable.
That is the bet worth making. It is slower. It is less certain. It is the only one that pays out in the long run.
Partnering up with a marketing company is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact what we do here at notefornote is to build tools for music promoters and independent artists to build real connections to the right audience.
If you would like to know more about our projects. Let’s Connect
