why is everything a scam?
Chaotic Good, Universal Music, Live Nation, and other (I feel) Multi-Level-Marketing Schemes.
I’m lying in bed with my boyfriend and I am showing him a video. There are two men, both wearing baseball caps. Baseball caps are well loved because they’re directly communicative. They usually just have a team logo. They are usually worn by American men who tell it like it is.
“Boston Red Sox.”
“Oakland A’s.”
The hat usually says.
But these hats are cryptic. One hat says “New York or Nowhere” the other says “Tombolo.” These hats are worn by marketing men. One says “I’m from New York. And I love that.” The other guy says “I am boho and nonchalant, but also rich.”
These men in the video sit in plush chairs in front of a generous velvet curtain because they are speaking on a Billboard panel. And because people who speak on a Billboard panel are successful, they are feeling very comfortable and safe.
They tell the beautiful young woman interviewing them that they own a company called Chaotic Good, which is a company that creates thousands of fake accounts to force the virality of specific songs. Their company is a bot farm. They call it simulating trends. They also “control the narrative” by not only forcing the virality of their clients, but also all of the comments under the things they post. They say that the opinions of the masses are usually the first comment they read.
I laugh because I know these guys.
When I was working at a major record label, I was put in a position called Coordinator. I was in a department for marketing. Within the first few weeks, I felt like my job was fake. Like maybe my boss’s job was fake.
My manager often didn’t have clear direction for me, and when I asked for tasks, one of the main things I was told to do was go on Reddit and post about the artists we were working on, trying to blend in as a fan.
I felt I was essentially working as a human Reddit bot. I had a degree from one of the best Universities in the World. That’s why I was hired. I got banned from almost every music related page on Reddit. I got banned from r/LosAngeles.
When I asked my boss for other tasks, he told me to do his expenses. They were mostly for meals and Ubers. There were very few, maybe about 10 a month. There wasn’t much else.
One time, someone from our website team told my boss that it would take 24 hours to change the home page. My manager’s reply was something I will never forget and can’t repeat.
Universal Music published its annual report earlier this week. Lucian Grainge, the CEO, makes 764 times more than his employees, and women are paid 48% less than male counterparts. It seems like there is something here about men in positions of wealth created through deception. Something about positions of power made by standing at the top of a pyramid scheme.
I’ve also seen how Live Nation operates close-up. Live Nation is a company that I feel scams people. They do this by working in tandem with Ticketmaster and OVG, one company that controls ticket sales and the other venues. Live Nation only delivers its high profile, celebrity clients to OVG venues, which then uses only Ticketmaster to process the sales.
According to Live Nation/OVG Exhibit 1244-27, Live Nation operates at a loss in order to monopolize celebrity talent. This loss is then filled by gouging fans through “dynamic pricing” and other fees.
This monopoly allows them to line their own pockets at the expense of the fans. This also forces venues to work with them. If a venue wants to use another party, like SeatGeek, they won’t have access to Live Nation artists. If venues don’t have access to talent, they can’t afford to exist. This is how culture, art, and live music dies. For more information on this, I highly recommend this article.
The reason why the news about Chaotic Good is catastrophic is because it was considered the last frontier for independent artists to bootstrap their careers. We know the music industry is corrupt, that it exploits women, that it manipulates numbers, inflates sales, sets its own metrics. In the unjust world of entertainment, independent artists were told that social media was their ticket to self-sufficiency. Build a social media following was the message sold to independent artists trying to build a career on their own terms.
The interview with Chaotic Good demolishes this image of an equal internet, where everyone is at the mercy of the algorithm. Instead, they figured out how to control the algorithm themselves – through artificial botting. Now, independent artists, no matter how many times they post a day – don’t stand a chance against the thousands of “fans” paid for by record companies.
The internet was the last place where artists, with all the odds stacked against them, still had a chance to be heard. Chasing virality was already a crapshoot when everyone was playing on the level. Now, you can’t go viral unless you’re paying Chaotic Good to pretend it for you.
The reason why these men in the video are so confident is because they know what they’ve done. They’ve figured out how to make themselves, their company, the only way to go viral. They’ve won, because anybody who doesn’t hire them is already set up to fail.
The internet is dead.
Next year the fan bots are filling the feed with the AI artist that they want to sell, sell, sell to us –-
I will be in my corner trying to sing to somebody real.
Good piece.
I noticed just now that they removed every artist from that Chaotic Good site. There were still a bunch there on Wednesday, but there's nothing there now. Eliza Mclamb's post got action!