GoKawiilEdit 4/2: One day after this piece went up, Chaotic Good made significant changes to their website — including pulling the “Narrative Campaign” section completely. Some of the artists I write about here no longer feature on the website, though it is not clear if they are still clients of Chaotic Good (my suspicion is that they are, and that their managements are removing public associations with the company). That being said, some of the examples I cited here can no longer be traced back to their website, but feel free to use the waybackmachine or similar to check my work!
If they had it their way, music business executives would rather not deal with the fans at all.
Fans are a complicated, messy, unpredictable group. Sometimes they love a record, sometimes they hate it. Sometimes they love the single and hate the record. Sometimes they love the record and hate the single. They’re teenage girls, oldhead uncles, Gwenyth Paltrow, and the guy checking your groceries out at the Safeway. Their communities are niche and complex, their tastes formed not only by the artists they listen to but by the opinions of other fans. As an executive, you can inflate the charts, you can buy streams. You can buy vinyl (though who even cares about that). You can even pay people to crowd the shows once or twice. But for any art worth your investment, you will eventually need real people to reliably, measureably, and genuinely care about it.
In the dream world of an executive, fandom is something like a parasitic disease — contagious through mere exposure, trafficking quickly between hosts with immediate contact and little to no external intervention. This way, the executive needs only to create a Patient Zero and watch the snowball gather material. The disease would spread seamlessly, easily. It would be viral.
Last week, I came across a Billboard interview with the founders of Chaotic Good Projects, a digital marketing agency that promises to create virality by, among other things, manufacturing hundreds of fake fan accounts for musicians.
Having been a working musician for the better part of the last decade, this was not particularly surprising to me. Commercial music exists for a reason (it is widely liked and extremely profitable), and it is no secret that there is a gigantic machine that is not only behind our biggest stars, but playing a part in breaking the new mainstream. There are kinds of music that are compatible with TikTok trends, and others that rely on a broader context, a less immediate delivery. Distinguished taste is something people pride themselves on — the idea that they have some resistance left still, that they don’t have to listen to the Alex Warrens of the Sombrs of the world simply because the algorithm has offered its teat to suck.
Alex Warren and Sombr are, to no one’s surprise, clients of Chaotic Good Projects. These two are part of the new mainstream broken primarily by algorithmic social media platforms, though Chaotic Good’s client list also includes more established pop giants like Dua Lipa, Shawn Mendes, and Justin Bieber. The careers of these people, while obviously influential in my industry, are not really what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the people who made it without capitulating completely to commercial demands, whose personas don’t eclipse their work. People who are making stuff that’s simultaneously viable enough to be profitable and still uncompromising on a vision. I’m interested in the real rock stars, if we have any left.
playing with the piano facing away from the audience is verifiable rockstar shit
The first time I heard Cameron Winter’s “Love Takes Miles,” I probably heard it one hundred times in a row. I had found it a week after its release and became immediately convinced that I was one of the few people in the world who knew about this perfect, beautiful little secret. At the time, the song had just under a million streams, and I was obsessed with showing it to everyone. Everyone soon caught on. The next year, it was the summer of “Love Takes Miles.” I played it in rental cars in Los Angeles and off my phone speakers in the most remote parts of Chimney Rock, North Carolina. The rest of that record was a similar revelation for me. I had discovered some kind of magic.
Though, I can’t remember exactly how I discovered it. I didn’t hear about the song from a friend or a music blog, and can’t recall a particular memory — only that of seeing the title somewhere on my phone and searching it up on Spotify. How I came to know the song is almost irrelevant information at this point, eclipsed completely by the experience of loving the song on my own terms, creating my own memories with it. The song just came to me, from somewhere, populating seamlessly in a stream of consciousness. A stream of consciousness, otherwise known as an algorithm.
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