Geese and Chaotic Good Debate Is Really About Class Politics and Privilege

The recent discourse surrounding agencies like Chaotic Good has exposed a fracture in how we understand the modern music industry. While many defenders argue that this is "just marketing"—equating it to the age-old practice of payola—this comparison is a dangerous oversimplification. By flattening the distinction between traditional advertising and modern digital manipulation, we are effectively giving a free pass to a new, more insidious form of systemic inequality.

Photo Credit: Tape Wounds

For years, we’ve been sold this idea that social media democratized music. That anyone could break through if they were talented enough, persistent enough, or smart enough online. But that story was never fully true, and now it feels harder than ever to believe. What social media really did was move the gatekeeping somewhere else. The same few platforms still control distribution and discovery, only now they do it through algorithms, engagement metrics, and the endless demand to turn yourself into content. If you want access to an audience, you often have to pay for it, game it, or both.

That’s where campaigns like the ones being discussed here become so frustrating. They don’t exist in a vacuum. They rely on coordinated posting, networked accounts, and carefully engineered moments that are meant to look organic. And because we’ve all been trained to read virality as proof of value, it works. But virality is not the same thing as organic interest. More and more, it just means someone invested enough money and strategy to make something look inevitable.

People keep saying, “This is just marketing. The industry has always worked this way.” And yes, there is truth to that. Music has always had its own forms of manipulation. Payola is the obvious example: labels paying for radio play, manufacturing hits, distorting what counted as popular. But what’s happening now is more diffuse and harder to trace. Payola had a structure you could point to: label, station, payment. What we have now is more slippery. It hides inside internet culture, fan accounts, memes, boosted posts, and the general vibe of something that seems to be spreading naturally when it’s really being pushed from behind the curtain. That makes it harder to call out, which is part of the problem. Dare I say, it feels like the professionalization of deception.

There’s another layer here too: the industry has quietly redrawn what it expects from artists. You’re no longer just supposed to make music. You’re supposed to film yourself, post constantly, be clever, be relatable, be searchable, be a brand. If you can’t or don’t want to do that, you’re treated like you’re not serious.

And that’s where a lot of people are being left behind. Not every artist is built for social media. Not every artist wants to make their life into a performance. Some people are better at writing songs than posting clips. Some people’s work comes from privacy, patience, or introspection. That should not make them less valid. But this system does make them less visible. It filters them out before the music even has a chance. So when people say “it’s just marketing,” what they really mean is: this is the cost of entry now. And that’s exactly what makes it feel so hostile. Not everyone can afford that cost. Not financially, not creatively, not psychologically.

At this point, the privilege conversation becomes unavoidable. A lot of the people who benefit most from these systems are also the ones with the most resources to navigate them. They can hire help. They can buy visibility. They can spend money on campaigns that other independent artists could never dream of affording. That doesn’t mean their music is automatically bad. It means the system is stacked in their favor before the first note even lands.

Independent music is supposed to stand for something different. It’s supposed to resist exactly this kind of gatekeeping. It’s supposed to feel closer to community, trust, and genuine discovery. When it starts to look and act like the same system it was meant to be outside of, something gets lost. People are right to be frustrated because this is not just about one campaign. It’s about what kind of culture gets built when money decides who gets heard.

“But the music is good” is the most common sentiment that so many people keep coming back to. Yes, the music might be good. That’s not the argument. The argument is that there are thousands of artists making great music who will never get the same push, not because they’re worse, but because they don’t have the same access to money, networks, or strategy. When we excuse the system because we like the final result, we end up reinforcing it. We’re basically saying: if I like what I’m hearing, I don’t care how it got to me. That’s a bad standard. It rewards the people who can buy attention and punishes the people who can’t.

The quieter loss here is organic discovery. That used to be one of the best parts of independent music: stumbling onto something through a friend, a local show, a zine, a label you trusted, or a scene you happened to be in. Those pathways mattered because they felt human. Now they’re being replaced by something more engineered. Instead of finding music, we are increasingly guided toward it. And once that becomes the norm, it starts to shape taste itself. It changes what feels exciting, what feels valuable, and what kinds of artists get space to exist.

Of course, it would be naive to believe that the music industry was ever a perfectly fair playing field. But we have to acknowledge that these dynamics are creeping deeper into independent music, turning what was once a space for authentic connection into another branch of late-stage capitalism. When we look the other way, we are complicit in an industry that views the artist as an expendable piece of “content.” It is a slow shift from music culture to content culture. From scenes to aesthetics. From community to reach.

It is time to stop hiding behind the quality of the art to excuse the toxicity of the industry surrounding it. True connection and community are being crushed by an algorithm designed to monetize access—and until we stop equating “viral” with “valuable,” we will continue to let the vultures build a culture that pacifies us with content rather than feeding us with culture.