How music promo learned to blend into your feed

Chaotic Good’s narrative marketing tactics revealed how online chatter can be manufactured to control what people believe about performances and artists. The approach differs from older radio airplay, traditional media campaigns, and playlist-driven strategies by flooding comment sections with anonymous praise to drown out critics and generate virality. The resulting marketing infrastructure is increasingly invisible, making it hard to tell whether posts come from fans or from labels and managers. Social media also changes discovery, with algorithms finding music for consumers rather than consumers searching. As feeds merge fans, critics, celebrity, and commerce, stealth ads can infiltrate feeds more easily, and music marketers are adapting.

"“A lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse,” Spelman said on the podcast. “The second the SNL performance drops at midnight, you should post 100 times saying that was the best performance of the year.” Skeptics of the ascending New York City rock band Geese, a notable Chaotic Good client, were suddenly, unexpectedly proven right: at least some of the band's online chatter was manufactured. The revelation spurred an existential industry unraveling. Is everything marketing now?"

"Flooding comment sections with anonymous praise to drown out critics and manufacture virality is very different from old-school radio airplay strategies, traditional media campaigns, and even the playlist-focused approach that overtook the industry in the late 2010s. The contemporary marketing infrastructure is increasingly invisible, leaving one wondering if every post of praise was spawned by a label or a manager."

"Social media has given PR and artist teams a more diffuse set of channels to work through and its role in music discovery has shifted as algorithms have evolved. Research from MiDiA found that in 2025, 43% of consumers say they don't search for music on social media but that the algorithm finds it for them. As algorithms continue to collapse news, celebrity, and commerce into a single feed, it's only become that much easier for stealthy ads to infiltrate our feeds, and music marketers are catching on."

"“Everything appears in the same feed: a fan account, a critic, an algorithm-laced playlist,” Cam Litchmore, a National Publicist at Take Aim Media, writes via email. The PR company ha"

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