The Music Thread

nrsair said:
Not sure if they ever got posted here but a band called Geese- kind of jam/indie/art rock blew up in a big way earlier this year thanks to their album Getting Killed. Which was a fine album but didn’t really grab me.

Turns out they hired a firm to help them go viral and it worked, and lots of people kind of feel weird about it. Obviously marketing firms have been around forever, but this one in particular seems to specialize in making social media campaigns seem very organic, which is leading to the bad feelings.

www.wired.com

The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop

The Brooklyn band Geese was labeled an “industry plant” by those who questioned its sudden ubiquity. Maybe it was.
www.wired.com www.wired.com


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Half Real and Long Island City Here I Come are amazing. Their rhythm section is top tier. The fake engagement story is a bad self own, but I guess you do what you need to get to where you want to go.
 
Additional self-promotion - I got to play bass for Willy Mason on a couple of shows last week. I wasn't familiar with him prior, but great songwriter and good voice.
 
Icky Mettle said:
Interesting. I became a big fan a little over a year ago. I first got into Cameron Winter’s (Geese’s frontman) solo album that came out at the end of 2024. It totally grabbed me. I still listen to it frequently. I had never heard of Geese before that, but upon learning that was his band I checked out their most recent album at the time, 3D Country, which came out in 2023. Loved it. I was hyped for Getting Killed and it didn’t disappoint. Loved it as well. The wife and I caught Geese at the Grey Eagle in Asheville in November 2025. It was cool to see them in such a tiny venue. They probably won't play a venue that small again for a long time, if ever.

I don’t have an issue with the social media marketing. It’s the way things work these days. Much of their success can also be attributed the good reviews the album got as well, which is independent from the marketing. The reviews can easily pan a heavily marketed album and they often do. I don’t really follow social media anyway, so when I stumble upon some musical act, it’s not directly related to marketing. I generally have no idea what’s supposed to be cool or not cool.

And after reading that article, none of it seems like a big deal or anything nefarious.
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It suggests a lack of authenticity for a band lauded for their authenticity. So, in the context of this particular band it is kind of a big deal. For someone who is perceived as being more manufactured like maybe Taylor Swift it might not matter at all.
 
p5mmr9 said:
It suggests a lack of authenticity for a band lauded for their authenticity. So, in the context of this particular band it is kind of a big deal. For someone who is perceived as being more manufactured like maybe Taylor Swift it might not matter at all.
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I don’t see it that way at all. That doesn’t strike me as having anything to do with authenticity. It’s not like someone else came up with their music, or that they fabricated a background story, or that the band was formed via “casting” (like the Monkees or boy bands), etc. They apparently just used some effective means to promote their music through modern technology. Bands have been trying to find effective ways to promote their music ever since the early days of rock ‘n’ roll. This is just a marketing tool that artists can have access to now.
 
Don't much care but will point out that the Monkees ended up doing some good music as a group and Michael Nesmith did later on his own.

Also the seminal punk band, the Sex Pistols , was put together from bits and pieces by their manager.
 
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Icky Mettle said:
I don’t see it that way at all. That doesn’t strike me as having anything to do with authenticity. It’s not like someone else came up with their music, or that they fabricated a background story, or that the band was formed via “casting” (like the Monkees or boy bands), etc. They apparently just used some effective means to promote their music through modern technology. Bands have been trying to find effective ways to promote their music ever since the early days of rock ‘n’ roll. This is just a marketing tool that artists can have access to now.
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They had AI create fake accounts to build fake engagement which fed into algorithms on various social media sites making it seem - to the algorithms - that Geese was generating more “buzz” than it actually was and which encouraged the algorithms to spread Geese content further through other “real” accounts.

It is nothing like The Monkeys which was a band created for TV, playing on Hard Days Night Beatlemania, which recorded real songs that became real hits.

Geese is a great band and I enjoy their material, but this use of AI is a bad look for a band that wants to show an authentic face. Anthony Fantano’s review of Getting Killed begins by referencing Geese’s authenticity amid a sea of AI. It’s kind of gross they went this route.
 
p5mmr9 said:
They had AI create fake accounts to build fake engagement which fed into algorithms on various social media sites making it seem - to the algorithms - that Geese was generating more “buzz” than it actually was and which encouraged the algorithms to spread Geese content further through other “real” accounts.

It is nothing like The Monkeys which was a band created for TV, playing on Hard Days Night Beatlemania, which recorded real songs that became real hits.

Geese is a great band and I enjoy their material, but this use of AI is a bad look for a band that wants to show an authentic face. Anthony Fantano’s review of Getting Killed begins by referencing Geese’s authenticity amid a sea of AI. It’s kind of gross they went this route.
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Eh. Doesn’t bother me. It just has the effect of putting them out there to more people and/or generating interest/curiosity so more people might check them out. The people in the bad are still real and the music they make is steal real. At the end of the day, it’s up to peeps to decide whether to listen to them and then whether or not they like them. There are just new, effective ways of generating buzz, and they jumped on that here. It’s nothing new to promote a band like they’re about to be the next big thing; it’s just a new way of doing in the world algorithms.

And I know it’s nothing like the Monkees. That was my point when I said it’s not like the Monkees.

I wish had access to the means there are now to promote music when I was in a band 30 years ago. I had to resort to creating posters with pictures that would hopefully catch people’s eye, taking them to Kinko’s, then putting them all over places where folks who might be interested in coming to our show would potentially see them.

When I did college radio, artists (or their management or labels) would send us all types of promotional things and try to get us to put that artist in the A rotation and talk about them in hopes of giving them exposure. They’d send things like stickers that they’d want us to hand out so that people would stick them in public places and on their cars to give the appearance of there being buzz in order to generate more buzz. If they only had the ability to do what the Geese did here, it would have been utilized a lot. A big thing about the music industry is artists/their management/their labels trying to find effective ways to generate buzz about the artist, and one longstanding promotional tool to generate buzz has been to make people feel like there’s already a lot of buzz surrounding the artist. There are just new ways of accomplishing that now.
 
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