Slave To The Algorithm: Why Working Class Musicians Are Giving Up On Being Heard

Musicians aren't just expected to create content anymore, they're expected to become content themselves. This isn't just an artistic crisis, it's a class war.

There’s been a lot of discussion this month about what it takes to be heard as a musician in 2026. Eliza McLamb’s article on digital marketing agency Chaotic Good went viral, drawing commentary from musicians about the wider implications of their “fake fans” marketing strategy. Hiroki Tanaka’s Reddit post about his album’s failed PR campaign was picked up by Stereogum, stimulating further debate. We’re about to embark on our own DIY PR campaign for our forthcoming album and it’s hard to know what, if anything, will make anyone actually listen to it. The PR landscape for musicians has changed radically in recent years, how should artists approach music marketing in 2026?

Fandom as contagion

When Eliza McLamb heard this interview with the founders of Chaotic Good Projects on Billboard, she was shocked to discover that an artist and track she thought was her own “perfect, beautiful little secret” actually came from them as a part of a “narrative campaign”.

“I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass-market, commercial pop... But [Chaotic Good’s] roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect... Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.”

Chaotic Good works by, in their own words, “controlling the discourse”.

“I think in the past, let’s say like a label and a management team do a great job. They get their artists on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J or something like that. Then they post it and then they kind of wait for the comments […] what we do at Chaotic and with our management clients is, the second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”

Chaotic Good doesn’t just share content, it creates accounts to respond to that content and simulate trends, which will ideally snowball into real, organic users jumping on the trend and amplifying it. They’re simulating until the simulation becomes real.

It’s different from the traditional method of “the waterfall” release and media saturation. Share music incrementally over a long period of time through as many channels as possible, get articles written, pay for plays, do tours, be omnipresent. But people aren’t using traditional media to find music anymore, they use social media. And they don’t even watch the content themselves, they read the comments to gauge the value of something. Chaotic Good point this out in their interview:

“I think most people see a video or see something about an album that came out and it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”

In behavioural psychology this is known as social proof. Part of what made Eliza McLamb’s article go viral is the way it exposes how our behaviour is manipulated by the marketing machine. We know about propaganda but for some reason assume social media is immune to this kind of manipulation. We think we’re interacting with real people online, people we subconsciously infer guidance from, but we’re not. Much of what we see has been infiltrated by external agents to shape a particular opinion.

However, the underlying issue is not just the fact that the opinions we thought were our own have been subtly shaped by an expensive machine, it’s that if artists today can’t afford to pay for that expensive machine, no one will hear their music.

The False Promise Of The Social Media Democracy

Once upon a time there was a social media platform called MySpace. It gave everyone their own web page connected to other MySpace users. They could customize it to look however they wanted, people could comment, and send messages to each other. There were no ads. There was no algorithm. Just the free flow of information.

Many bands in the ‘00s blew up because of MySpace. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Calvin Harris, to name a few. Our very own Chris Black’s previous band Katsen landed record deals through MySpace. The early days of social media are responsible for the persistent myth of going viral then making lots of money. The two halves of that equation have never been more disconnected.

MySpace succumbed to algorithm-driven platforms and the gatekeeping emerged again, this time with the tech titans controlling the interactions between musicians and fans. I remember discovering for the first time that even though we had a few hundred followers on Facebook, they wouldn’t see our posts unless we paid to “boost” them. That was just the beginning.

As the algorithms evolved, the content that rose to the top was not just the most liked and shared but the most consistently and frequently posted. To be seen on social media one has to spend hours, daily, posting and engaging in other people’s content. Most artists don’t want that job and moreover, don’t have the capacity. Kamola Atajanova of Tape Wounds articulates it perfectly in their response to the Chaotic Good furore:

“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.”

Hiroki Tanaka’s candid Reddit post about the failure of his “by the book” album PR campaign sparked a wave of recognition across the music world. After two decades in music and awards with his previous band he decided to release his solo album, his “last hurrah”, with management, a label, and a professional PR campaign. He even started a TikTok account posting show videos, behind the scenes and goofy memes all around managing a job and family life.

Tanaka watched the release arrive after eight months of promotion to little more than “a weak trickle” of attention. For most musicians, Tanaka’s story didn’t feel exceptional, it felt familiar.

“I was told, under no uncertain terms, that my lack of a social media presence and streaming metrics meant that certain media outlets that had reviewed my work (highly, I might add) in the past could no longer spend money on paying a writer and editor to review my work… I would have preferred if they had said they didn’t like my album. Being rejected because of my metrics is a slap in the face for art.”

Social media has become the driving force behind a release, and while it is accessible to anyone, there’s actually a huge price to pay in both time and mental health. The volume of content required to feed it is beyond most musicians, who are generally holding down full time jobs to survive. The underlying purpose of all this extra content is to feed a machine, and it doesn’t feel good dedicating your precious little free time to feeding a machine.

Jumping Jacks For Clicks

Soon after reading Tanaka’s post, we got an email from YouTube Creators prompting us to “Get Creative With Goals” on our livestreams.

They’re encouraging us to “set goals that encourage your community to collaborate,” and suggest celebrating those goals by “doing something unexpected – whether that’s jumping jacks, making up a song, or playing a prank.”

Yes, you read that correctly. YouTube is telling artists that the path to success involves performing arbitrary physical tasks to generate engagement.

It’s sad how often life imitates an episode of Black Mirror these days but this is almost exactly the scenario in season seven’s episode “Common People”. A man who needs money for an enshittified service ends up performing increasingly degrading stunts on a streaming platform for money. What was meant as dystopian satire has become platform policy.

Like Watching A Car Crash

If you want to see where this road ends, look at Joshua Block.

For those unfamiliar, Block a.k.a. WorldofTShirts, is a TikTok creator who rose to fame during the pandemic by posting videos of himself doing silly dances and reviewing boba teas. After turning 21, he developed a taste for alcohol rather than boba tea, and a controlling manager stepped in to steer Josh’s content towards more extreme behaviour and increasingly degrading acts.

Theodore Gary wrote an in depth study of this phenomenon of what are essentially “freak shows” for the algorithm in The New Critic in February this year. In Postscript, the New Critic’s author interviews, editor Rufus Knuppel ruminates on the relationship between Josh and his viewers:

“When you’re watching body-cam footage of a police officer, you don’t form this parasocial relationship — it’s an anonymous police officer. But with Josh, he’s your friend, almost. But he’s a friend that you’re torturing, a friend you’re watching get tortured.”

This is what happens when “content” becomes separated from art and human connection. When engagement is the only metric that matters. The algorithm doesn’t reward what’s “good” it rewards what’s most compulsively watchable. And sometimes that means watching someone’s dignity erode in real time.

There is an easy way for musicians to avoid all this of course. Hire a company like Chaotic Good.

What Comes Next?

We may be reaching an inflection point. As McLamb notes, the more ubiquitous manufactured virality becomes, the more artists will resist it entirely, pulling back from streaming and social media in favour of hyper-local, scene-based growth. A return to the tangible, the real, the unmediated.

While this sounds good in theory, it’s probably not going to work for unusual artists in small towns. They’d have to go to a city to have more of a chance of finding their people, and with the cost of living, moving to a city isn’t possible for everyone. By the time I left London in 2009 all the artists I knew were leaving, it just wasn’t sustainable anymore.

The problem is systemic. Musicians don’t typically make a living from their music. This means their time is diverted to day jobs. Their dwindling leisure time is necessary for making and performing music. There isn’t time to also produce a volume of “content” for social media. On top of that the mental health cost of interacting with addictive apps as a performing monkey is not appetising. This creates a class system in the music industry. There are those who can afford to pay to be heard and those who can’t. And those who can’t are either paying with their souls, or they’re opting out altogether and not being heard at all.

The only real solution to this system is a culture change. When people stop inferring opinions from social media and start connecting directly with other people again. When networks of local scenes connect up and exchange information unmediated by third parties. Music journalists were also gatekeepers, but at least you could reach them, maybe have a conversation with them. At least they were human.

Artists have some power here too, in how we choose to show up for people. Do we focus on posting constantly to externally owned platforms or build something slower and stronger? For us, that means connecting with our fans via a monthly livestream. We talk about our challenges and experiences making and listening to music. We ask and answer questions. We share stories. We do not do jumping jacks.

We continue to use social media as that’s where so many live, but I’m imagining a future where we don’t have to post several times a day to five different platforms to push a new release. A future where discovery is driven by real-world connections; at gigs, by email with DJs and reviewers and from our fans out to their networks of friends and family. We’ll continue to share our work on our website, mailing list, livestream and with our beloved subscribers to connect directly with the people who care about our music.

You can’t manufacture authenticity forever before people start seeing through it. You can’t ask artists to be everything; musician, videographer, copywriter, performer, brand, without burning them out or pushing them out of the industry entirely.

The question for listeners is: what kind of music culture do we want? One where discovery is orchestrated by marketing agencies and every trend is potentially manufactured? Where our favorite artists spend more time strategizing TikTok hooks than writing songs? Or one where we have a human to human connection which grows organically. It might be slow, but just as good lumber is grown slowly with its rings closely pressed together, it will be strong.

Fast-grown lumber vs slow-grown lumber.