Geese Got Caught Being an Industry Plant and Indie Rock Has to Reread the Contract

A Brooklyn rock band gets compared to The Strokes, lands on the cover of the New Yorker’s best-of-the-year list, plays SNL in January, and headlines a Coachella afternoon in April. By any old-fashioned measure, that is the story of a band that earned its crowd one chord at a time. Then a marketing agency named Chaotic Good Projects opened its mouth, a WIRED reporter wrote it down, and the entire indie internet decided it had been catfished by a flock of geese.

The band is, in fact, called Geese. Their fourth album Getting Killed came out in September 2025. The New Yorker called it the album of the year. The backlash arrived seven months later, in the form of a single quote from co-founder Andrew Spelman, who told WIRED: “We are kind of studying the internet and TikTok and seeing what’s working organically and trying to recreate it at scale inorganically.” He also volunteered, helpfully, that “our office is overrun with iPhones.”

What Chaotic Good Actually Does, in Plain Cat English

If you have ever wondered why a song you have never heard suddenly soundtracks fourteen unrelated TikToks in a single scroll, this is the answer. Chaotic Good runs a fleet of agency-controlled accounts. Each account looks like a normal fan page or a normal teen with normal opinions. Each account posts clips of the song. Volume goes up. The TikTok algorithm, which mostly cares about whether a sound is being attached to videos, decides the sound is trending. Then real users see the clips, and some of them genuinely like the song, and the inorganic spike turns into organic motion. The marketing has done its job: it has bought the band a starting line.

Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren put it less politely: “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation.” That is the kind of sentence that ends careers, except in this case it ended nothing, because the agency’s client list reads like a Spotify Wrapped: Coldplay, Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, Tame Impala, Zara Larsson, Alex Warren, Sombr. Geese is not the exception. Geese is the only one who got caught with the receipts visible.

The Backlash Is About Indie Rock, Not Pop

Nobody is upset that Coldplay buys ad space. Coldplay is a stadium machine. The expectation around stadium machines is that money is being spent on you in ways you cannot fully see. The deal is fine because the deal is honest by virtue of being obvious.

Indie rock runs on the opposite contract. The implicit promise is that four guys in a Brooklyn basement made something so undeniable that the internet found them on its own. When that turns out to be a fleet of iPhones in an office, the story does not break because the music is bad. The music might be great. The story breaks because the romantic delivery system was a costume. Record label marketing manager Jarvis Cooper said the obvious thing in the band’s defense: “Literally every single artist is using the techniques mentioned in the WIRED article.” He is right. He is also describing exactly why people are angry.

Musician Eliza McLamb pointed at the part nobody wants to look at directly. If streams and fan pages can be bought, what does it mean to “make it” as a band that cannot afford the agency? The question rhymes with everything we have written about AI fakes hijacking real jazz musicians on Spotify and the masked Quebec duo who turned the AI music panic into a stage prop. The new bottleneck is not talent. It is whether you can afford to manufacture the appearance of having already broken through.

Yes, Industry Plants Have Always Existed

The phrase “industry plant” sounds new. It is not. Frank Sinatra had a payola problem. The Monkees were assembled like a cabinet. Lana Del Rey did the lip implant interview cycle. Every decade reinvents the same accusation, because every decade reinvents the same tension between art that wants to feel found and a business that needs you to find it on a schedule.

What changed in 2026 is the visibility of the wiring. TikTok promoted a single mechanic, which is “the audio is trending,” to be the load-bearing column of the entire pop discovery machine. Once the column is named, the machine to game it is inevitable, and the gamers are now mid-sized agencies with real offices and real org charts. Coren is correct that a lot of the internet is manipulation. He is also describing a job that did not exist five years ago and now appears in the credits of an SNL musical guest.

The Pudgy Cat Take

Cats have a useful relationship with manipulation. They live inside it. The treat appears because they sat on the laptop. The door opens because they screamed at it. They do not pretend the system is neutral. They optimize against it without filing a Substack about it.

The Geese discourse is humans rediscovering, with great drama, that taste is now downstream of distribution. The fix is not pretending we can return to a 2009 internet where blogs broke bands. That internet had its own marketing tricks (paid Pitchfork tipsters, planted MySpace top eights, a thousand record-store clerks doing favors). The fix is admitting which acts you genuinely love after the magic trick is explained, and which ones you only liked because the algorithm asked you to.

Geese might survive this fine. Getting Killed is, by all accounts, an actual rock record made by actual humans who write actual songs. If the music is good, the asterisk fades. If the music is fine but forgettable, the asterisk eats the legacy, because the legacy was never load-bearing in the first place. Either way, the next time you see a band suddenly everywhere, the honest move is the cat move: enjoy the food, but do not pretend nobody opened the can.

What Happens Next

Two things, probably. The first is that Chaotic Good gets more clients, not fewer, because the case study is now public and labels have budget meetings tomorrow. The second is that a generation of listeners learns to ask a slightly more humiliating question before falling in love with a band: am I hearing this because somebody wrote a great song, or because somebody bought a hundred iPhones? It is the same question we already learned to ask about Ticketmaster pricing and Drake freezing his own city for an album rollout. The romance is over. The accounting is interesting.

For the record, the cats have an opinion. They think Geese is fine. They also think you should stop scrolling and put on a record you bought before TikTok existed. There are several in your apartment. They have been sitting on them.