Most people outside the music industry had never heard the name Chaotic Good before April. That month, the digital agency’s co-founders, Andrew Spelman and Jesse Coren, pulled back the curtain on their “narrative marketing” tactics on Billboard’s On the Record and promptly broke the internet. “A lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse,” Spelman said on the podcast. “The second the SNL performance drops at midnight, you should post 100 times saying that was the best performance of the year.” Skeptics of the ascending New York City rock band Geese, a notable Chaotic Good client, were suddenly, unexpectedly proven right: at least some of the band’s online chatter was manufactured. The revelation spurred an existential industry unraveling. Is everything marketing now?
Flooding comment sections with anonymous praise to drown out critics and manufacture virality is very different from old-school radio airplay strategies, traditional media campaigns, and even the playlist-focused approach that overtook the industry in the late 2010s. The contemporary marketing infrastructure is increasingly invisible, leaving one wondering if every post of praise was spawned by a label or a manager.
But not all of it looks like Chaotic Good. Social media has given PR and artist teams a more diffuse set of channels to work through and its role in music discovery has shifted as algorithms have evolved. Research from MiDiA found that in 2025, 43% of consumers say they don’t search for music on social media but that the algorithm finds it for them. As algorithms continue to collapse news, celebrity, and commerce into a single feed, it’s only become that much easier for stealthy ads to infiltrate our feeds, and music marketers are catching on.
“Everything appears in the same feed: a fan account, a critic, an algorithm-laced playlist,” Cam Litchmore, a National Publicist at Take Aim Media, writes via email. The PR company has worked with artists like Fcukers, Nilüfer Yanya, and Thundercat. “To a casual listener, they’re all wearing the same uniform.”
Rather than manipulating the algorithm like Chaotic Good, marketers are more commonly going directly into it by reaching out to prominent social media accounts that fit a given artist’s target audience. The publicity “win” comes from getting the song, or whatever the campaign’s aim is, distributed to said audience and having it blend in naturally with the account’s usual content rather than reading as blatant promo.
One such account that marketers have tapped for this strategy is @jimmysoldout on X. “If you're a pop music lover, all you're seeing on the timeline is stuff about your favorite artist and pop music,” Jimmy Ryan, the account owner, tells The FADER over Zoom. “If you’re going to see one Tweet of mine on the timeline, you're not going to think [it’s an ad]. It just blends in with the rest of what you're seeing. Like, I'm talking about this girl regardless.”
Across social media platforms, X, TikTok, and Instagram, accounts like Ryan’s have become passive channels for music marketing without audiences even realizing it. Through them, marketers have figured out how to pay to directly access the exact audience they’re chasing without looking like they’re paying at all.
The accounts themselves ideally exist within their own subcultural ecosystems. Some operate like traditional publications (Pop Crave, Base, and Tingz). Some are more bloggy, semi-anonymous pop culture diarists (@allurequinn and @notgwendalupe on X; @velvetcoke on Instagram). Some operate like meme pages (@left4rat on Instagram) while others are personality-driven tastemakers (@skyferrori and @jimmysoldout on X). They’re not super unlike the more common, face-first creators like Margeaux Labat (@marg.mp3) and Zara Wiley (@zarasmixtapes), but their appeal is different: these accounts feel more casual, almost anti-establishment. Like a friend.
Take a scroll through Jimmy Ryan’s @jimmysoldout. There, one will find a respectful, if chaotic, balance of pop standom and general life happenings: a gushing post about how Zara Larsson and Tyla’s “Hot & Sexy” remix will be a song of the summer, followed by frenetic streams of consciousness about music (“i feel like pinkpantheress could be the one to bring miranda cosgrove back to pop music”) and not (“In life you either twerk or you drown”), followed by posts about graduating from Temple University. It feels like being boots-on-the-ground for all the latest news in left-of-center pop and R&B; any announcement showing up on your feed already has Ryan’s opinion attached.
If you’re going to see one Tweet of mine on the timeline, you’re not going to think [it’s an ad]. I’m talking about this girl regardless. —Jimmy Ryan
A promo-but-not-promo post on Ryan’s page might look like an off-the-cuff recommendation of Kim Petras’ recent singles because “they’re all produced by Margo XS who produced this entire Zara era,” or an impulsive quote Tweet about R&B trio FLO’s album announcement. (“A CONCEPT ALBUM AND IT’S 16 TRACKS????? WE’RE AB TO BE SO WELL FED IM SHAKING”).
While these tweets may seem overly informal, Litchmore, the publicist from Take Aim, says that these accounts are seen as trustworthy curators precisely because of their posting style. Because accounts like Ryan’s feel like people first and creators second, the songs they share take on meaning based on everything else on their profile. “People look to find guarantees for music or the expectation to be led to the next big underground act,” he adds. “It's always a matter of finding the places that people trust.”
“Because I'm an account that’s very pop culture, always tweeting about every song I stan and love, I've been able to create a voice for myself that I can incorporate into these ads,” Ryan, who has nearly 35,000 followers, says. “The people following me are doing so for that reason. They love that [I’m] talking about the pop girls; they love my humor, wit, and the personality I bring to my music promo.”
Ryan says the personality he gained a following from is exactly what artist teams are paying for. “These companies recognize that and are like, ‘Okay, we can work with this person who will, instead of making a really obvious ad, use their voice and personality so it blends and reaches their specific audience.’”
These social accounts have become a standard part of song and album rollouts. Leon Alpuche, owner of the popular X account @skyferrori, says he’s been getting hit up by marketing agencies or labels since 2020. “They're really taking their time to understand how we operate in these communities,” he says. Alpuche, whose account has nearly 100K followers and earned a shoutout in Charli xcx’s “360” music video, has become an “if you know, you know” hub for real pop heads.
@Velvetcoke, an Instagram account, meanwhile, has revealed next to nothing about their offline identity to their 2.1 million followers, but their taste alone earns trust. “I get tons of messages daily about how much [my followers] love my curation and respect my research and knowledge,” Velvetcoke writes over email. Their feed looks more like a Tumblr blog than a personal profile, with pop culture content spanning decades and genres. A 2010 selfie of Lady Gaga and a fan sits in between a clip of Megan Fox talking about drinking Machine Gun Kelly’s blood on Call Her Daddy and a video from Kim and Kanye’s first date. Velvetcoke fosters intimacy with their followers by embedding themselves in culture rather than appearing as an institutional authority.
Velvetcoke began posting about artists like Doechii and Olivia Dean early in their careers and recently featured new music from Holly Humberstone and Adéla. “At this point, I consider myself someone who recognizes potential,” they say, noting that they’re selective about what artists make it onto their page. “My page comes first. My priority is working with brands, artists, and labels that align with my personal interests… I’m very grateful for those who are willing to appreciate the authenticity.” That goes for the PR teams, too, who want the placement to feel native enough to travel organically.
Increasingly, the point of promotion for artists and these pages alike is for it to be indistinguishable from the rest of the internet’s feed and not “stick out like a sore thumb,” as Ryan puts it. “That's when I feel like I'm deceiving my audience.”
And the goal, in turn, has become less about driving streams and more about the replies, reposts, quote Tweets, aesthetic associations, gradual familiarity, and brewing conversation. Ryan sees X, specifically, as a platform where artists become embedded in culture over time, a place to “play the long game.” He points to artists like Tinashe and Zara Larsson, whose songs repeatedly circulated through stan communities before reaching broader audiences. “Even if they’re not running [to listen] right away, you’re still getting this artist in people’s minds.”
“Even if they’re not running [to listen] right away, you’re still getting this artist in people’s minds.” —Jimmy Ryan
So — are these accounts doing mind control? Deception? Just marketing? Litchmore says that they’re “not trying to collapse [recommendation and promotion],” but simply “introduce music into spaces where it has a real chance of carrying that enthusiasm through.”
But the core tension of these posts is that they are ads at the end of the day, even without looking like them. According to Ryan, not-an-ad ads can go from $50 to $300 per post, depending on the account’s rates, the artist’s campaign budget, and the artist's popularity. (Through his many interactions with artists' teams, Ryan’s observed that this specific social strategy is often given a budget of $1000 to $3000, with the biggest campaigns allocating closer to $5000.) Ryan says he posts three to four music promos every week; most often he’s sent a preexisting Tweet by a PR team and asked to devise different captions with which to repost it.
“The large-scale narrative-shaping people imagine is expensive, rare, and usually reserved for artists with substantial backing,” Litchmore adds. “The reality for most independents is that they have to approach the space differently.”
Still, like the unveiling of Chaotic Good, the inherent lack of disclosure in this approach might make people feel iffy. By FTC standards, it is legally deceptive not to disclose when a post is an ad. But there’s also ethical and social murkiness in getting a post from an account you follow for their takes, and not knowing it’s an ad in shitpost clothing. It’s enough to make me look at my own feed differently, now, and feel a little bamboozled for not realizing what was right under my nose. It’s another instance of something I thought was safe from the algorithm actually having a whole orchestration behind it, like a Truman Show-meets-Nathan Fielder-meets-Punk’d segment.
No one is being forced to listen to the songs these accounts are being paid to promote, but the artist, track, or music video is entering your consciousness, if only in passing. Later on, when you hear the name, you might think you’ve heard it before, even if you can’t place when or where. This just might be an inescapable part of existing online in 2026. Now, at least, one might have the tools to more easily spot it — before inevitably, something else just as stealthy comes along to replace it.
