• Music marketing now includes agencies that use sock puppet accounts to post songs on TikTok.
• It sometimes makes it hard to determine what’s organically popular and what’s spreading online because of “clipping.”
• A marketing agency promoted the songs of buzzy rock band Geese by flooding TikTok with clips, a new report says.

I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about how the internet works.

I can usually tell if a piece of content is “organic” or advertising. And yet, there’s always the unknown unknowns: You might think you can always tell if someone has a bad toupee, but what about all the good ones that you didn’t notice?

Yet, I feel more and more that we are living in a time of undetectable toupees on the internet. And even I have to admit that I am an easy mark these days.

Take the recent kerfluffle over a WIRED article about how a marketing agency promoted the songs of the buzzy rock band Geese by flooding TikTok with videos from accounts created by the agency, a tactic the agency’s founders described in detail in a Billboard podcast interview. (The agency didn’t return BI’s request for comment.) This set off a lot of discussion about whether these strategies are just the latest form of marketing for the music industry, or some nefarious “psyop” (the consensus seems to be the former).

I am less concerned with music promotion than I am with the idea that, indeed, there is a lot of fake content floating around, and I am less and less equipped to accurately identify it when I come across it.

How ‘clipping’ makes it harder to tell what’s authentic

A lot of this is the proliferation of “clipping” — paying people to post short clips of longer content, like the most interesting 30 seconds of a podcast interview or the craziest moment of an eight-hour livestream. Have you noticed clips of the looksmaxxer Clavicular all over your social feeds lately? Those aren’t being posted by his official account — they’re from clippers.

This new clipping economy also extends to music and traditional media like TV and movies, and it is increasingly hard to tell whether a clip you scroll past in your feed is part of a paid campaign.

For example, I looked at the Discord channel for a clipping agency, where various ad campaigns will offer money in exchange for views.

A stand-up comedy special being broadcast on a streamer was offering $65 per 100,000 TikTok views. A right-wing podcast was offering $150 per 100,000 views for clips made with its Rumble stream. A popular personal finance YouTuber was offering $75 per 100,000. That campaign had some instructions: “very simple, don’t make [YouTuber] or the guest(s) look unnecessarily bad … let the content itself do the talking.”

Putting out short clips from longer videos or streams is simply the current way of doing things, and the results are obvious. One analysis of the audience for TBPN, the tech news livestream that OpenAI just bought, showed that while the livestreams average only 7,000 viewers, the clips average 257,000 views. That’s a big difference!

To be clear: Geese is a popular band that people like; Clavicular is a popular internet figure; TPBN is a popular news podcast — regardless of any clipping. You can’t fake content people find appealing — people have to actually like it for this stuff to go viral and show up in your algorithms.

But still, we often mentally gauge the popularity of something by how often it pops up in our social feeds. And the fact that some of these videos are being boosted by forces other than pure fandom, well, that is clouding our perception a bit.

Over the last decade, we have honed our BS-detectors for certain kinds of advertising or marketing — the way an influencer tags a brand, or a celebrity wears a clothing label. But this is a new twist — something to wrap our heads around, and it’s clearly effective marketing for now, perhaps precisely because we aren’t good at detecting it (yet).

Of course, only an idiot would believe that everything they see online is authentic. You and I? We’re not idiots! I’m giving us some grace here to admit we’re getting fooled lately.