Nosheen Iqbal

Today, the fake fans behind your favourite band.

Discovering new music you love, I'd argue, is still one of the most satisfying ways to feel good.

And so when fans flocked to Geese in the last year and made its frontman Cameron Winter the most talked about indie star of the moment, it felt like a genuine rush of emotion and connection.

A win for the grizzled Brooklyn aesthetic that hadn't been hip for at least a decade.

They ruled end-of-year lists.

Their tours sold out.

If you've never heard of them, I promise this was a big deal for a band that were barely born the last time New York bands were called.

But what if all the hype wasn't entirely authentic?

What if it was cooked up to make geese go viral?

The story of how one band dominates the cultural discourse would have been an argument left for the music press and indie blogs.

But in 2026, it's a saga that reveals a whole lot more about how we all consume music now, how we find it, how it's fed to us, and how the industry and musicians are desperately trying to adapt to technology that threatens their very existence.

From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal.

Today in Focus, what does it take to create the hot new thing in music?

Shah D'Souza, you're a culture journalist and one of the bigger, let's call it, discussions of the last couple of weeks on your beat has been this frenzied discussion around the band Geese and whether they are or are not an industry plant.

They've generated a lot of hype.

There's talk of fake acclaim and fanhood that isn't deserved or real.

Can you just, first of all, tell me about Geese, Cameron Winter and their rise?

And so what happened in the last month to call all that sort of genuine fandom and rise into question?

Right, so suddenly the excitement around the band didn't seem so real anymore.

And it's been a really big deal because it's caught fans off guard.