How Music Marketing Learned to Blend Into Your Feed

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. They’re not super unlike the more common, face-first creators, but their appeal is different: these accounts feel more casual, almost anti-establishment. Like a friend.

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.”

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.”

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. 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.

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 another instance of something I thought was safe from the algorithm actually having a whole orchestration behind it. 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. This just might be an inescapable part of existing online in 2026.