Brooklyn indie rockers Geese shot to the heights of rock and roll fame at the end of 2025. Their fourth album Getting Killed, was released in late September and dominated the year’s top 10 lists. Their fall tour sold out almost everywhere. The collective buzz earned them slots on Saturday Night Live and at Coachella and made the band (and frontman Cameron Winter, who has his own solo career) something close to a household name—at least in households where polyrhythmic art rock is a topic of conversation. The Guardian’s review of the new record called Geese “the new saviors of rock ’n’ roll.”

Their explosion onto the scene, seemingly out of nowhere, led to an inevitable backlash. Haters called them a “psyop.” Some questioned their sudden-seeming rise to superstardom, calling them “an industry plant.” Others, while acknowledging their talent, attributed their fame to savvy marketing. Certainly, when a band blows up so quickly, it can seem inorganic, and a bit weird. When a band moves from the edges of the conversation to smack in the center, it can raise suspicions that its darling status was attributable to some sort of back-room machinations rather than a rare combination of talent, hard work, and a bit of good luck.

Now, those paranoid-seeming suspicions have been proven true—sort of.

In late March, the cofounders of the digital marketing company Chaotic Good Projects—who provide, per its Instagram, “digital experiments and musical mayhem”—appeared on Billboard’s On The Record podcast. In the episode (recorded live at South by Southwest) Chaotic Good’s Andrew Spelman and Jesse Coren explained how their viral marketing methods work.

Essentially, the firm creates networks of social media pages (typically on TikTok) and uses them to drive the band’s music into the recommendation algorithm. Songs are dropped into the backgrounds of videos. Live clips are shared. Sometimes, burner accounts, comments, and whole ecosystems of interactions can be fabricated out of digital cloth, stoking—and in some cases, completely manufacturing—discourse around an artist. These ginned-up interactions push the songs and the discussion about them higher up a platform’s algorithmic rankings. And social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube are, increasingly, where (real) fans discover new music.

“We can drive impressions on anything at this point,” Spelman told Billboard. “We know how to go viral. We have thousands of pages.” Spelman has dubbed the process “trend simulation.” And the campaigns themselves are referred to by Chaotic Good as “narrative” or UGC (for “user-generated content”) campaigns.

Now Chaotic Good cofounder Adam Tarsia confirms to WIRED that his company engineered campaigns for both Geese and Cameron Winter. “We helped distribute clips of them performing and doing some interviews on TikTok,” Tarsia says via email, speaking on behalf of Chaotic Good. “I understand that ‘industry plant’ discourse is inevitable, but we’ve had the pleasure of being Geese fans since their 2021 project Projector,” which, he notes, was released four full years before his agency launched.

The long-bubbling suspicions about the band’s rise boiled over the first week of April. A viral Substack post by singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb traced the connection between Geese and Chaotic Good and mulled the fuzzy ethics of such marketing. As McLamb summed up the model: “If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome.”

“I wasn’t expecting the piece to be as widely shared as it was, and I was happy to see a conversation get started around the whole thing,” McLamb, who is currently on tour supporting her 2025 album Good Story, says of her post, titled “Fake Fans.”