“Come to the show and f**king tell me how many bots you see”: Geese clap back at claims their popularity is a “psyop”
You’ve heard of industry plants… but who exactly is planting these curated artists? While overnight success stories once masqueraded as calculated record label marketing, the notion of an ‘industry plant’ has recently become far more sinister. Because what if the CIA are manipulating the charts in an attempt to psychologically control audiences en masse? What if a one-hit wonder is infused with political propaganda, designed to infect our minds and dull our senses?
… is what someone crazy might believe. Unfortunately, plenty of innocent up-and-coming bands have been sucked into the whirlwind of such conspiracies – with potentially the biggest name to come under fire being Geese.
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Back in April, the indie rock unit were labelled a ‘psyop’ (shorthand for a ‘psychological operation’ used in the military when referring to psychological warfare) in an article by Wired. The piece was inspired by an original Substack article written by singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb, entitled Fake Fans, which looked into Geese’s marketing agency, Chaotic Good. In it, McLamb critiqued how the company used manipulative marketing strategies, like posting ‘fan edits’ across TikTok to curate a ‘Fake Fandom’ before any real fandom had formed.
Now, Geese have finally addressed the entire fiasco. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, bassist Dominic Digesu has one thing to say to anyone genuinely believing they’re a ‘psyop’: “Just come to the show, and fucking tell me how many bots you see!”
If you’re wondering, Geese are regularly selling out pretty big shows. In September, they sold out two nights at Queens’ 13,000 capacity Forest Hills Stadium. So it does without saying that there are plenty of flesh-and-blood Geese fans out there.
Nonetheless, the band seem pretty worn down by the discourse. However, they’re keen to clear the air and assert their genuine appeal. Frontman Cameron Winter even chimes in, acknowledging how people might believe the band were an industry plant; when he saw all the praise rolling in, he started to doubt whether the attention was genuine or not.
For a moment, he believed that the band’s record label was paying for bots to stream their music and post about them. “I thought the same thing, I really did,” he admits. “That seemed like a reasonable explanation. We were just like, ‘Oh my god the whole fucking thing is fake’. We were having a meltdown.”
It got so bad that the band even chased down their label to find out what was the truth. “We marched up to our label over email, the relevant team members, like ‘how long have all our fuckin’ fans been fake, you sons of bitches?’” Winter says.
In the end, it turns out that no bots were being used – just a really dodgy, “shitty” marketing technique which involved Chaotic Good flooding TikTok with videos every day. “We learned that we should shot up to Zoom meetings about how our record’s going to be advertised,” the frontman admits. “It wasn’t comments or fake fans or bots or anything. It was low-effort TikTok posts that were used to boost the algorithm.”
In spite of the bad press, Geese are a very real band from Brooklyn. If you’ve got a second, you can give their last album, Getting Killed, a listen – because, if their fans are all robots, it’d be nice for them to win over a few human listeners.
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