There was a time where people would get signed based off of their talent before there was a fanbase … and the team + label would develop the artist and build the fanbase from the start.
A&R used to actually mean something
RCA asked me what my brand was the very first meeting we had. Wide eyed and broke at 23 I said “being a human being”. They looked at me like I just punted an infant and said nah lmao.
Jay-Z out here freestyling at Roots Picnic dissing Drake, Nicki, and Dame Dash and y'all calling it a power move. Bro that's a man fighting to stay in the conversation. You don't punch down at three different people in one freestyle if you're secure. Real talk, this is relevance maintenance, not dominance.
Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients.
The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show.
In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views.
“On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown.
“Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.”
Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: https://t.co/hlcdfSmzPc
Everyone is talking about music marketing. After digital agency Chaotic Good went viral for explaining their approach in detail, music fans across the internet started to wonder if everything they knew and loved about their favorite artists was faked, duped, or planted...a psyop.
To get a clearer picture of what music marketing looks like in 2026 and demystify a polarizing topic, we spoke with eight industry experts and insiders to hear their takes.
By @Will_Schube
Read: https://t.co/R9y8OQQuQa