Geese - Getting Killed

[Lola Piscine]

 

 

 

 

Puisqu'on est plusieurs à avoir classé leur album dans nos tops de fin d'année, je trouve qu'il est temps que le groupe ait son topic sur CIF.

 

Originaire de Brooklyn, le groupe est formé en 2016 de 5 membres, avec Cameron Winter en lead singer. Leurs démos autoproduites attirent l'attention de plusieurs labels indépendants dont 4AD et Sb Pop. Finalement, le groupe signe avec Partisan Records.

 

Ils sortent 2 albums, Projector (2021), et 3D Country, 4D Country (2023), avant que l'un des membres, Foster Hudson, quitte le groupe.

 

La musique du groupe mélange plusieurs influences rock comme le dance punk, le rock expérimental ou la new wave, et est comparé à des groupes comme Squid, LCD Soundsystem ou The Strokes, ce qui donne un son unique, foisonnant au niveau des instruments et porté par l'agilité et la versatilité vocale de Cameron Winter.

 

Getting Killed sort en 2025, et est acclamé par la critique.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Visiblement Cobra fait une petite percée dans les charts. 

 

 

 

[MadMan®]

Ah merci pour le topic ! Ca fait quelques semaines que j’ai découvert suite à toutes les bonnes critiques de leurs albums (j’adore la pochette). Mais je suis très partagé sur la manière de chanter du chanteur (seulement 23 ans!). Je sais pas parfois je trouve ça brillant et le jour d’après ça me crispe. Je suis perdu !

[Cristallin]

Taxes 

[Lola Piscine]

Je crois que c'est Island of men ma favorite de l'album.

[Phunk Spector]

Petit point d'actu pour le groupe qui démarre l'année 2026 sur les chapeaux de roues.

 

Tout d'abord ils étaient il y a 2 semaines les musical guests du Saturday Night Live :

 

 

 

Et voilà qu'aujourd'hui vient de sortir leur Tiny Desk Concert :

 

 

Setlist :
- Husbands
- Cobra
- Half Real

 

Nouvelle date au Bataclan le 6 Mars (le show prévu à La Cigale le 7 Mars est complet) :

 

 

Cameron Winter va très bientôt faire reparler de lui en solo car un nouveau titre inédit intitulé Warning sera disponible le 6 Mars dans la compilation caritative HELP(2) :

 

 

Et puisqu'on en parle et vu que ça n'a pas été évoqué encore dans le topic, Cameron Winter a donc aussi en parallèle une carrière solo avec un premier album intitulé Heavy Metal sorti en Décembre 2024 qui, bien qu'au départ est passé sous les radars des classements de fin d'année, a vite fait grand bruit et a énormément contribué à l'envolé de la hype autour de lui et de son groupe Geese. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Murielle Bollroom]

J'ai raté la mise en vente pour le Bataclan je suis dégouté. Et dire qu'au moment de la mise en vente de La Cigale j'avais naïvement pensé que je pouvais me permettre d'attendre un peu avant de prendre des places qui étaient massivement disponibles 

[Lola Piscine]

Moi aussi j'ai loupé les deux dates, de toute façon je suis pas paruinard, ça aurait été compliqué.

 

Sinon j'adore 3D Country presque autant que Get Killed je pense. C'est du rock plus classique, teinté de country, y'a une espèce de folie euphorique tout au long du disque qui est géniale.

 

Il faut que je me penche sur le projet solo de Winter plus en détail, ça me semble encore différent des albums du groupe, plus "sensible" on va dire.

[MarAzul]

Jsuis amoureux de lui ça m'énerve trop

J'ai écouté que "Love Takes Miles" de son album solo qui est très belle, et ce que tu dis me donne envie d'écouter leur premier. J'ai loupé les places aussi pour Paris.... les chouffins de la France entière étaient mobilisés je pense mdr

[Phunk Spector]

Ils viennent de remporter International Group of the Year aux BRIT Awards 

 

 

[Phunk Spector]

Nouveau titre solo de Cameron Winter intitulé Warning dans la compilation HELP(2) :

 

 

[Phunk Spector]

 

[BluePrince]

Un nouvel article de Wired vient de sortir, déclarant que :

« Essentiellement, [Chaotic Good] crée des réseaux de pages de médias sociaux (généralement sur TikTok) et les utilise pour propulser la musique du groupe dans l'algorithme de recommandation. Des chansons sont insérées dans les arrière-plans des vidéos. Des clips en direct sont partagés. Parfois, des comptes temporaires, des commentaires et des écosystèmes entiers d'interactions peuvent être fabriqués à partir de tissu numérique, alimentant—et dans certains cas, fabriquant complètement—le discours autour d'un artiste. Ces interactions gonflées poussent les chansons et la discussion à leur sujet plus haut dans les classements algorithmiques d'une plateforme »

 

Je ne sais pas trop en penser, ça touche pas à la musique mais clairement on est sur du fake marketing et certainement boosté à l'IA en clair des faux comptes vont parler de la musique ou partager des vidéos musicales tout ça pour tricher sur l'algorithme. On est clairement sur de l'industry plant et si c'est si simple ils vont tous le faire.

[MarAzul]

C'est juste le principe d'une hype musicale à l'heure de l'IA. Ça n'a absolument rien de particulier à Geese et oui, ça se généralise déjà à l'heure ou on parle. Le boucan médiatique autour de cette histoire n'a aucun sens. 

[SlenderFrame]

Ce n'est pas propre à Geese.

La majorités des Trends (tik tok ou autre) ne sont pas organiques mais provoquées.

 

https://www.billboard.com/video/secrets-to-song-virality-on-tiktok-w-digital-marketing/

 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/apr/29/geese-outcry-phoney-virality-music-fans-hype

 

Citation

Companies such as Chaotic Good are confecting social media buzz to promote Geese, Oklou and other indie darlings. Industry insiders reveal how widespread the practice is – even if no-one is sure it actually works

Shaad D'Souza

Wed 29 Apr 2026 11.15 CEST

 

 

Did you get more fomo than usual from last year’s Glastonbury? Did you see a video of Overmono or Lorde or Self Esteem that made you seethe with jealousy? That may have been because more of your friends genuinely did attend the festival last year – or it could be because those acts, and 25 others including Fatboy Slim, Charli xcx and Doechii, paid a digital marketing agency that sent influencers and content creators to watch their sets and upload organic-looking clips to social media.

Take a quick look at Your Culture’s Instagram page and you’ll find that the boutique UK agency had a hand in disseminating some of 2025’s most viral live music moments: the Last Dinner Party’s raucous “medieval sleaze” album launch party; Chappell Roan’s headline set at Reading festival. If you saw video from Calum Scott’s surprise set at St Pancras International last year, or Alex Warren’s outside Warren Street, it’s likely because of Your Culture. An Instagram post from January boasts that the brand “worked with 55% of the nominees” of the most recent Brit awards.

It has long been understood that political parties and A-list actors use social media platforms to create fake sentiment. Music fans may also expect it of mainstream pop stars – but not so much in indie music, where there is still an expectation that online discourse comes from real fans.

 

That illusion was shattered earlier this month when Reddit users and musician Eliza McLamb highlighted a recent Billboard interview with Chaotic Good Projects, a marketing company that specialises in disseminating music on TikTok. Chaotic Good’s roster features many of 2025’s biggest breakouts, including Geese and their frontman Cameron Winter’s solo project, plus Sombr, Warren, Oklou, Zara Larsson, Mk.gee and Dijon.

 

Chaotic Good uses a variety of methods to manufacture a positive sentiment around an artist. There are narrative campaigns, designed to push a specific story about the artist by paying microinfluencers and music-discourse accounts to post about them. There are user-generated-content campaigns, which employ Chaotic Good’s network of affiliated influencers to share specific types of content soundtracked by specific songs from the artist. And there are fanpage campaigns, wherein Chaotic Good creates and maintains social media accounts of fake fans for the artist. These accounts post a variety of content – including clips from music videos, concert footage, and posters for upcoming tours – all with captions about how brilliant they are, in a tone that skews young and zealous.

 

Since the interview went viral, many of the above artists have faced accusations that their success is confected, Geese and Winter especially. (Geese offered no comment when contacted by the Guardian.) But according to multiple sources, this kind of marketing has long been employed by indie and major label artists alike.

Other firms offering similar services include Byword, which promises campaigns “rooted in the marriage of contextualisation and cross-pollination”. Its client list overlaps with Chaotic Good’s – including Oklou, Mk.gee, Geese and Winter – and has included Depeche Mode and Dominic Fike. There are also older, more influencer-focused agencies such as Creed Media, which has been described as “the agency behind some of the most viral songs on TikTok”, and Flighthouse, which works with musicians as well as film studios. There is also an automated service, Floodify: for less than $200, artists can have their music hosted on posts from hundreds or even thousands of TikTok accounts, many of them owned and operated by Floodify, which set the music to viral – and generally banal – video formats such as surrealist AI “brainrot” animations or edits of YouTubers reacting to things.

It is well known that majors and indies often operate fake fan pages for their artists. In some instances, as with former Fifth Harmony singer Normani, it has also been suggested that artists are running fan pages themselves (Normani neither confirmed nor denied this). Even unsigned acts do it: many sources I spoke to mentioned a manager who disseminated clips of his buzzy young artist on various fake TikTok accounts in order to drive a bidding war between labels, securing them a healthy record deal and a plum support slot on one of the year’s biggest tours.

In many ways, this is the oldest music marketing trick in the book – akin to a new version of 20th-century payola strategies, when labels would pay radio programmers or record stores to promote a single. Hype is rarely truly organic, instead resulting from tit-for-tat agreements between publicists and editors, agents and festival bookers. Yet the recent revelations have left many fans feeling duped. Genuine Geese fanpages are alight with debate about whether the band’s success can still be seen as legitimate. Meanwhile many listeners who were already sceptical of the hype around Geese and Winter are revelling in the “proof” that they were right. The somewhat hysterical discourse speaks to the fact that, even in the streaming era, listeners felt that indie music offered respite from an increasingly corporate music world.

“I forgot the general music consumer doesn’t realise there’s a million companies that do this, and that this is just a symptom of a larger marketing trend that’s been happening for a decade now,” says Jack, a music manager who recently employed Chaotic Good to boost his artist (Jack requested anonymity). Listeners are familiar with conventional advertising, he says, but for many of them, “this idea that you can create an atmosphere that incepts people’s opinions is crossing a line. Even though every public figure who uses marketing does something like this.”

Jack’s attitude was: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Spending on, say, Facebook and Instagram ads isn’t effective if competitors have “a million fan accounts working for them”. So he contracted Chaotic Good to create a handful of fake TikTok fan accounts, each posting videos three times a day, aiming to “encourage discourse through seeding bespoke narratives”: in this case, that Jack’s artist is a prestige songwriter, among other objectives. The package cost $2,000 (£1490) a month with a minimum nine-month term, according to a marketing deck seen by the Guardian. But after Chaotic Good bragged about manufacturing virality in its Billboard interview, Jack began to worry that it “could overshadow all the super hard work the artists I work with have been doing, just because we decided to fuck around a little on TikTok.”

Your Culture’s creator marketing service is different: the agency sends a set number of flesh-and-blood TikTok creators to a gig to post about it favourably, charging clients £200 a pop, sometimes with a minimum spend of £2,000. Laura, a marketing professional who has worked with major labels and indies, and who also requested anonymity, says doing this can be “a gamble” because clients can’t choose which creators attend each show – meaning that “they’re not necessarily genuine fans, and their [viewers] aren’t necessarily going to be fans of what they’re posting”. In Laura’s experience, Your Culture’s service is useful “if you’re trying to show that a band is having a moment”, but can also feel “like a box-ticking exercise”.

It’s also debatable whether these campaigns are strictly legal in the UK. The Federal Trade Commission has deemed this kind of marketing legal in the US, but per the UK Competition and Markets Authority, any time a social media creator has been “incentivised to promote, endorse or review a product”, they must clearly label the content as an advertisement. But the guidance for creators is aimed at product endorsement – for example a clothing item or cleaning product – which doesn’t cover what agencies such as Your Culture and Chaotic Good do.

When a song by her management client started to gain traction on TikTok, artist manager Anna – not her real name – employed Chaotic Good to generate more content around it. This was a user-generated-content campaign, so Chaotic Good contacted the owners of meme pages, song-lyric accounts, and those who post montages of TV shows and movies, and paid them to use Anna’s client’s song in their posts. Working with such agencies is only worth it off the back of organic groundswell, Anna says – although that does make it impossible to measure tangible benefits. Her artist’s song numbers went up, “but I don’t know whether to attribute that to them or if it was just the natural trajectory of what that song was going to do.”

Agencies such as Chaotic Good offer “the illusion of really helping”, she says, when realistically, “all of these things are kind of a complete hoax”. What is successful on TikTok changes by the week. “No one actually knows the answer, so it’s just people who do really well at pretending like they know the answer. I think they would say that themselves.” (Chaotic Good, Your Culture and Byword did not respond to repeat interview requests from the Guardian.)

Before the outcry, the awareness that indie artists are employing these services had spooked other managers and labels into hiring them too. Jane, an executive at a medium-sized indie label who also requested anonymity, says that, last summer, as the hype around Geese and Winter surged, managers she worked with started expressing concern that they needed to be employing agencies like Chaotic Good. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, is this the new baseline?’” Jane says that she was shocked to find out that indie artists were employing these services, having imagined her peers were holding to “this inherent code of ethics where we’re not really practising the same skeezy marketing tactics that major labels are”.

There is a house-of-cards feeling to all of these campaigns. Traditional print or digital advertisements, and even social media ads, have long been losing efficacy. But streaming audiences keep growing; there is marketing money to be spent, and a handful of companies with vague promises of “narrativisation” and “organic growth” have stepped in to fill the void. But Geese were already popular before they employed Chaotic Good, and social media sentiment wasn’t what drove critic-led outlets such as Stereogum and the New Yorker to name their 2025 album Getting Killed the best of the year. A few extra TikTok clips of Chappell Roan don’t change the fact that she is one of the biggest artists of her generation, chiefly due to the quality of her songwriting and stagecraft. Recent weeks, however, have shown that these campaigns can wreak very real damage: no marketing spend can buy a genuine fan connection – as opposed to simply engaging “lean-back” listeners – and it’s the genuine fans who now feel betrayed.

According to Jack, in many cases, artists – busy with writing music and touring – don’t realise where their marketing budget is going, To him, it’s all in keeping with the murky ethics of operating in today’s music industry – no different to sharing music on Spotify, a platform often criticised for its low royalty rates or for previously running recruitment advertisements for ICE. “This is the same sort of moral quandary.”

Anton Teichmann, a Berlin-based manager and founder of the indie label Mansions and Millions – home to artists including Discovery Zone and Sean Nicholas Savage – argues that the use of these agencies is evidence of a music industry that is closed off to artists without big budgets. In a widely shared recent Instagram post, Teichmann wrote that “the same few platforms now control access to audiences, and of course they want to charge anyone trying to break through that barrier.”

Now that organisations such as Chaotic Good claim to drive music discovery – rather than community-based underground scenes – “I, even as a small indie label, have to basically compete in the same arena as [big pop artists] whether I like it or not”, Teichmann says. “We need to bring some kind of transparency to how these things are being done, because we are being told that it’s a level playing field, but that’s just not the case.”

Laura, however, remains sceptical as to whether this kind of marketing even works. “The interesting thing about Geese is that the streaming numbers are actually quite low,” she says. “For the amount Geese are being talked about right now, you’d think that number would be a lot higher, and I wonder if it’s because some of the hype has been inflated.” And Anna and Jack insist that these campaigns only work if fans already like your artist in some capacity. “You can’t contrive the moment if there’s nothing else going on,” says Anna.

Even so, the Chaotic Good debacle has sown mistrust among committed fans who are now destined to question how genuine the success of their favourite “indie” artist is in the future. Jack says the response also speaks to the ugly revelation that everyone seems to be trying to manipulate the algorithm these days. Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken them so long to realise, he says. “I’m also like, ‘most of the internet is bullshit’. Maybe people needed to wake up.”

 

 

[Mehdi]

Il y a 9 heures, SlenderFrame a dit :

Ce n'est pas propre à Geese.

La majorités des Trends (tik tok ou autre) ne sont pas organiques mais provoquées.

 

https://www.billboard.com/video/secrets-to-song-virality-on-tiktok-w-digital-marketing/

 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/apr/29/geese-outcry-phoney-virality-music-fans-hype

 

 

 

 

Ce que je lis me choque franchement. C'est l'aspect fake et mensonger qui me dérange le plus. C'est un peu comme du placement de produit sauf qu'un placement de produit est en général spécifié, l'influenceur mentionne que c'est une collaboration commerciale. Et ici de vraies personnes (les artistes) sont l'équivalent du produit... Faire de la pub sans le dire c'est déjà limite, mais créer en plus de faux profils et de faux engagements c'est encore plus injustifiable éthiquement car trompeur. Marketing n'est pas synonyme de mensonge. C'est très problématique quand même... (je parle du contenu de l'article en général, pas de ce groupe en particulier)