if a thing has to be faked to work on it, maybe it’s not worth working on

Here are my thoughts on so-called "Geesegate," or more broadly, on how the methodology of marketing matters.

For those catching up: a band called Geese released a record last year, the record got a lot of good press, and Geese went from unknowns to one of the most talked-about bands in independent music in the span of months.

In April, the founders of Geese's management and marketing agency, Chaotic Good, discussed their approach on a Billboard podcast. That approach is to manipulate comments with bots and cellphone farms, evoking inorganic momentum until organic momentum takes over. In other words: fake it so you make it.

That episode launched a hundred Substacks from artists and music journalists, and, ironically, thousands of comments across dozens of platforms.

Here's my take, as someone who's seen the rise (and fall) of independent artist after independent artist, and who has overseen some of the most successful (and failed!) independent music marketing campaigns of the last 15 years.

Let me address a couple of things at the outset, briefly.

First: does the Chaotic Good strategy even work? That's debatable. Chaotic Good has since removed their client list, but I follow several of those artists, and what's worked for Geese clearly hasn't worked for many of the others, or at least not yet.

I've long said that marketing music is like playing a game of Battleship, but harder: not only can you not see today's board, the board changes every day, and the only information you have is from yesterday's. What worked yesterday may or may not work today. What worked for one band may or may not work for another.

Marketing should be data-informed, but with music especially, there are so many variables involved that it's nearly impossible to guarantee results.

So let's observe that.

Second: let's also note that manipulating comments is neither new nor creative. Its roots go back to Cambridge Analytica, to Gamergate, to 4chan, all the way back to aughts gaming forums like Something Awful. There's nothing novel about it. It's also a strategy that has both worked and not worked. And as nearly every article pointed out, manipulation happens all the time in marketing.

With those out of the way, I want to talk about my own personal "Geese moment."

I was at Music Biz 2025 last year. One of the seminars was on "leading an army," on how to build your own band of Little Monsters or Swifties. I respect the panelists and the companies they represented, so it was a must-attend for me.

The strategies they described weren't quite using a phone farm to spam comments, but...they were close. After the panel, I caught up to the panelists and asked them: is this really how it works for their teams? Standard operating procedure?

And they asked me: didn't I do that with Sufjan?

I said no. Of course we didn't. They were surprised to hear that.

I've overseen large marketing budgets over the years, but I never spent that money on manipulation. Of course we did OOH, ads, all of it. You could argue that it's own form of manipulation and in a sense I'd agree. But everything we did relied on organic momentum rather than feigning it. The goal was no artifice, no manipulation.

"Well," one of the panelists replied, shrugging, "I guess Sufjan is the exception that proves the rule, then?"

I thanked them and left, taking a detour from the conference center into an attached abandoned mall attached, wondering if I even knew how to market music.

Let's take a little detour of our own here.

My dad went to technical school in the late 1970s, and for the rest of his life he worked in steel mills and factories as a metallurgist, until he retired a few years ago from Rolls Royce, working on jet engines. He was often the one turning out the lights in the factories and mills that closed in the decline of North American manufacturing. Mostly he worked with furnaces, machines bigger than two or three rooms that could superheat metal for testing.

When the Smith International plant in Edmonton closed, my dad was without a job for a long time. We lived on the leftovers of leftovers of Kraft Dinner. Then one day Green River Steel, a mill in Kentucky, called. They'd bought the furnace from Smith and needed my dad's help running it. So we moved to the States.

Along with running the furnace, my dad ran cold tests, chemical tests, force tests. His job was to make sure that this part of a metal bar would perform exactly the same as the other end of the bar under any conditions; that this bar from this batch would perform the same as every other bar in the batch.

My dad liked the word integrity. To most of us, "integrity" is a moral or ethical word. To my dad, integrity had a much more pragmatic meaning: this part of the metal is the same as the part at the other end, so you can rely on it.

Integrity is non-optional when you're making things like planes and skyscrapers and bridges. Engineers have to trust that every piece of the metal will do what it's supposed to do. The metal has to be consistent across itself, and across the batch. People die if the metal doesn't have integrity.

When I had my own "Geese moment" at music biz, wandering in the mall having a marketing existential crisis, the word integrity came to mind.

I take a systematic, holistic approach to marketing. Marketing music, or marketing anything, is about creating a path from the artist's intent and output to the fans' reception and interpretation of that music. A little bit like a steel beam. The start of the thing to the finish of it.

When it comes to music, that path from start to finish means I look everywhere the artist or label or project shows up: socials, email, press, merch, touring, yes the comments, and yes, even the customer service inbox. When I ran Asthmatic Kitty, I worked the customer service inbox as much as I could. Lowell, Sufjan's step-dad and the label's co-founder, had a firm policy: every customer service email gets read, every email gets a decent, human response, everyone gets treated with respect.

It's easy to look at a bridge and say integrity matters because lives will be lost. It's a little harder to do that with music. Yet, about 5 to 10% of those customer service emails were from fans telling us how an AKR artist's song had saved their life.

So music matters. Which is partially why it's so hard to market music right.

And that is why I'm not here to judge anyone for how they market music. Marketing music in 2026, marketing anything in 2026, is exceptionally difficult. The Battleship board of the music industry changes every day, the old plays stop working, and everyone's improvising with yesterday's information. I'm not going to call Chaotic Good, or anyone, good or bad, ethical or not. I don't think things are that simple.

But I can talk about me, and for me, integrity matters. Not as a moral badge or an ethical performance, but in my dad's sense of the word. Integrity is functional, pragmatic. A thing does its job better when the thing has integrity than when it does not.

When I think about Geese and Chaotic Good, here's what I keep coming back to. That panelist at Music Biz 2025 offered "the exception that proves the rule" as a shrug; Sufjan as a fluke, proof that everyone else does it the other way. As Chaotic Good said in their podcast episode with Billboard: everyone's doing it anyway, so they're just going to do more of it so they win.

But the longer I sit with the word "exception," the more I think about integrity, the more I think about artist agencies with onshore and offshore cellphone farms with bots manipulating fans, I think the exceptions are the point.

The artists I want to spend my life working with are exactly the ones who don't fit yesterday's playbook, the artists who reach people without having to fake it, for whom presentation matters from start to finish, and who turn out to be the exception to every rule someone else tries to write. Those artists are the interesting ones, the edge cases, the people whose work inspires me to think of new, creative solutions if only to keep pace with their art.

That's the work I really want. Not a safe campaign that copies what worked for someone else last quarter or five or ten years ago.

I want to work for the artist and project no one has a playbook for yet, where the only move left is to pay attention and build something true.

When you can't fake momentum, you have to make something worth it. For me, the art has to matter on its own. If a thing has to be faked, it isn't worth working on, because the constraint of integrity is where the creativity on a project originates. This path is slower, it's riskier, and it comes with no guarantees. It is an exception. And it's the only version of this job I believe in.

So keep the "rule;" The comment spam, the fake-it-so-you-make-it, all of it.

Me, I'll take the exceptions every time.