Fake fans, fake buzz? How your favourite band got big
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What is the significance of Geese in today's music industry?
This is The Guardian.
Today, the fake fans behind your favourite band.
You know, yesterday, let's do it.
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?
How did Geese's rise to fame spark controversy?
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?
So, yeah, it's been it's been a kind of crazy couple of weeks in the usually quite sedate world of indie rock. But Geese basically are a band from New York, a bunch of friends who grew up together, went to high school together and who make this quite like jammy, kind of bluesy rock band. But, you know, it's super hooky. They released a couple of albums a few years back, and then last year they released their third album, Getting Killed, and it was just this huge sensation. It seemed like suddenly overnight everyone was talking about Geese.
This is their album, it's called Getting Killed, here with the song Taxes, Geese.
A few months before that, their frontman Cameron Winter had released an almost Rufus Wainwright-esque album of kind of piano folk songs. And then, you know, over the course of 2025, both Geese and Cam Winter both kind of like blew up.
And so what happened in the last month to call all that sort of genuine fandom and rise into question?
At South by Southwest in Austin, which is a big kind of music and tech kind of industry festival, Billboard, which is kind of like the main music trade magazine, did a live podcast with the two founders of an agency called Chaotic Good Projects.
How do songs go viral today in this incredibly crowded landscape?
What marketing tactics are used to create fake fan engagement?
I'm joined here by Jesse Koren and Andrew Spellman. They are the founders of Chaotic Good, which is a digital agency used by so many people, it's hard to count. But a lot of labels hire them, artists, managers, all in the service of breaking their songs online.
The two guys kind of talked about how One of the services they offer is essentially the creation of fake fan accounts or kind of like fake social sentiment to kind of like boost a certain artist. And they were kind of bragging. They were talking quite openly about this idea that they were able to manufacture virality for anyone.
One thing that we always say is, all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments, which, you know, is a reminder to us of like, we can help, and I don't know if this will make anyone feel better, but we can, you know, a lot of what we do on sort of the narrative side will be, you know, controlling the discourse. And so, you know, I think most people see a video or see something about, you know, an album that came out and it's like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion, even when they haven't heard the whole album.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the significance of Geese in today's music industry?
0:00–2:03
2
How did Geese's rise to fame spark controversy?
2:03–4:13
3
What marketing tactics are used to create fake fan engagement?
4:13–8:11
4
How is the concept of authenticity challenged in indie music?
8:11–10:45
5
What are the primary challenges indie artists face today?
10:45–13:35
6
How do modern PR campaigns differ from traditional ones?
13:35–17:00
7
What role do algorithms play in music discovery?
17:00–20:00
8
How does the music industry adapt to the digital landscape?
20:00–28:23