How Music Marketing Learned to Blend Into Your Feed

The Rise of Invisible Promotion

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. 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.

The Algorithm as a Marketing Channel

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.

The New Tastemakers

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.”

The accounts themselves ideally exist within their own subcultural ecosystems. Some operate like traditional publications, while others are personality-driven tastemakers. 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.

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.

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 the goal, in turn, has become less about driving streams and more about the replies, reposts, quote Tweets, aesthetic associations, and brewing conversation. It is a long-term strategy to embed artists into the cultural consciousness.

While the lack of disclosure in this approach might make some feel uneasy, it has become a standard part of modern music rollouts. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, these stealthy tactics are likely to remain a fixture of how we discover—or are introduced to—the next big thing.