The hidden money financing your favorite songs

This message comes from Workday, the enterprise AI platform with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails, so every AI action is permission aware, giving you the ability to get work done right. It's a new workday. Do you have a person who turns you on to new music that fits and expands your tastes? Maybe it's a music-savvy friend or a family member, or a music site or a social media influencer with good recommendations. But are influencers taking money to promote music and not telling you? And what does that mean for regular music enjoyers who just want a trusted source for music discovery? I'm Stephen Thompson. Today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we are bringing you an episode of It's Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse sat down with NPR music reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento to get into the juicy details and the broader implications of this practice. Here's Brittany. Whose music recommendations do you trust and why? I mean, this is gonna sound annoying, but I have to say my colleagues at NPR Music. That's sweet. I love their recommendations. I trust their recommendations. I think they all have incredible taste, and they all have, like, a different specialty of music, so I go to them all the time. And also my best friend Kendall. She has great taste in music. I listen to anything that she recommends. I love that. I love that. I get mine from my friend Jordan, who I've been friends with since 2003. So you trust those recommendations? Yes. I have been taking his music recommendations for 23 years, okay? He's the friend who introduced me to M.I.A. back in 2004. She was not an easy artist to find in Michigan in the pre-social media era, you know? Yeah, totally. It's good to find people who are gonna put you on to some hot new music that is just your taste. But lately, it's getting harder and harder to trust online tastemakers because they might be getting secretly paid to shill for labels. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's real. Indie musician Eliza McLam posted a Substack about this a few months ago that went viral about a Billboard interview she watched with the founders of Chaotic Good, a digital marketing agency. These founders described their, quote, narrative campaigns and user-generated content that basically make viral moments happen through creating or paying social media accounts to post about specific artists. NPR music reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento saw this and wanted to talk to the online tastemakers that are paid to post and don't tell you about it, which, by the way, is potentially illegal. And there's a lot of questions that came up for me around this, like, what does this mean for us regular music enjoyers? And can we ever disentangle money from the internet and from culture? Isabella is here with me to get into it. Welcome back, Isabella. Thank you for having me. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. I want to first start by talking about these interviews that you've done with online creators. Like, how much are they getting paid? So it's a sliding scale. I talked to five content creators. Some of them requested anonymity so they could speak freely about the relationship between creators and record labels. But essentially, they all told me they're making hundreds of dollars off of these videos. Low end was about $150. High end was about $600 per video. They told me that either marketing agencies or record labels will come to them and ask them to make videos promoting a specific song or promoting a specific artist. Then they kind of, like, come up with a script. The marketing agency or label approves that, and then the video gets made and goes up. So there's a lot of back and forth. Wait, so, okay, describe to me, like, what do these videos look like? It usually looks like a normal person talking to their phone. Maybe they have a little microphone, and they're saying something like— Here's a great album that came out this week that you should know about. Or if you like so-and-so artist, have you heard of this person? Or sometimes they're also reaction videos, which are becoming more and more popular. And that's where there's like a split screen where maybe the top half of the screen will be like a music video, and then at the bottom you have a creator that's like live reacting to the video. Some of the people I talked to told me that they do these for money from record labels. Wow. Okay, so I've seen lots of videos that are like that, but those aren't SpawnCon, but like, I don't know. Maybe they are. I would say the key thing about these videos is they don't necessarily look like ads, because all of the people I talked to told me they often don't disclose when something is being paid for by a label or agency. So there's nothing that's like, you know, hashtag partner, hashtag sponsored content. Usually I feel like it's pretty clear when something is an advertisement. There's like a label at the bottom flagging that for you, and I think a lot of us just keep scrolling. These videos tend to not have that. Who are they promoting? Like what kinds of artists? I mean, I think across the board, this is way more widespread than we realize. Two of the artists that were named to me explicitly in the interviews were the up-and-coming pop star Bella Kay. She is signed to Atlantic. I reached out to Atlantic for comment about this, whether they could confirm or deny that they had been a part of these, you know, marketing campaigns, and they did not get back to me. The other artist, on the other end of the spectrum, was the Rolling Stones. Somebody told me they got paid to promote a single off the Rolling Stones' new album and that it wasn't disclosed. And that one was particularly interesting, Brittany, because the Rolling Stones put out this music video where they used AI technology to, like, deepfake younger versions of themselves. Oh my God. And it was for that same single. I also reached out to the Stones' label, and they also did not get back to me. So this is so— Yeah. Continue, but there's just something about this that's so desperate. Interestingly enough, the influencer told me that they asked him not to talk about the AI in the video. So it was kind of like trying to shift the narrative back into the music, like to talk about the song and how great the song was, and to not mention the controversy over the video. But yeah, I think a lot more artists than we realize are probably participating in this. The influencers told me it's a really common practice. But I think those two examples just show how this is happening across the board. If you have someone who's, like, an up-and-coming pop star with their first viral song, and then you have the Rolling Stones, it's like safe to assume a lot of people in between those two levels of success are probably participating in some kind of social media paid campaign. Yeah. I'm wondering, like, how did the influencers view the sort of ethics of what they were doing? Like, how did they think about this? To be honest, most of them expressed some kind of unease with the whole thing. You know, some of them said that they didn't want to feel like they were selling out to the music industry. They all said they would only accept payment for songs that they would be already likely to promote, or, like, that they would reject a song promo if they felt like it didn't already fit the kind of music they usually recommend or didn't already fit their taste. But for the most part, there seemed to be a real gray area in understanding, like— The legality around what it means to accept money and not disclose it to promote a song. And also, I think there seemed to be some confusion about the sort of moral and ethical guidelines around these practices, because I think, you know, in the old school days, if you, like, worked at a newspaper or a radio station or some kind of media company, there was probably some kind of ethical handbook that you were supposed to adhere to. There was something. There was something that, like, everyone kind of understood was, like, best practices and things that are frowned upon. I think influencing is kind of the wild, wild west. All of these people are independent contractors. They're all kind of figuring it out on their own, and they're all coming up with their own rules. So there are more gray areas, I think, for what some people find acceptable versus not acceptable. Right. This all makes me think of payola, which I'm sure some listeners are familiar with. It was a big thing in radio in the first half of the 20th century, where record labels were paying radio stations or even individual DJs to play particular songs. But it was officially outlawed in 1960. And now, you know, as you also noted, online creators have to say whether their posts are advertisements in accordance with FTC laws against deceptive advertising. But if they're promoting a song that's free to listen to, right, does that count? Right. And that's the reasoning some of the influencers gave me. You know, they were like, This feels different than trying to sell, like, makeup, because you're not telling people to go buy something. You're just telling people to listen to a free song. But I think what gets lost in that is that songs aren't free. Songs are technically products. They're products that labels and artists sell. Even if you're not buying an album, but you're listening on, say, Spotify, there are people getting royalties for those streams. If you're using a sound repeatedly on TikTok, like, and then listening to it that helps drive, you know, the Billboard charts. Like, I think there's all these waves of how listening to a song or promoting a song does sort of then inspire conduct that makes people money. It makes the record companies money. It makes the artists money. And according to the Federal Trade Commission, if there's any kind of financial relationship or endorsement, the influencers are supposed to be disclosing it in the caption. They're supposed to be disclosing it as superimposed text on the video and in the audio. So regardless of whether people think a song is free or not, they are accepting a financial relationship from a record label or a marketing agency, and they're still not following those guidelines of clearly disclosing it to the public. 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Member FDIC. This message comes from Easy Cater, making it easy for organizations to order food for meetings and events from favorite restaurants, set up meal programs for their employees, and manage food spend all in one place at easycater.com. Something I'm wondering is, like, why is there this kind of fuzziness, like in the music industry specifically? Like, there are plenty of brands for makeup or clothes or food or whatever that have open relationships with online creators. What makes music different? Like, why is this such an issue in music where people are, like, really upset and offended by this in a way that maybe this is not the case in other industries? I mean, I think there are a couple of reasons. One being the gray area that you noted, that maybe people feel like there is more of a fuzziness around listening to music versus buying a product. People don't necessarily see music as products, I think. I mean, that's a whole issue in and of itself. Yeah, you know, we see music as art, and I think it's something that— People really take to heart, like you build community through music, you connect to other people through music, you build parts of your identity through the music that you listen to. And I think people are really attached to this idea of, like, taste-making and music discovery as being these organic activities, as being this thing that you do because it's a reflection of who you are as a person and the things that you like. And I think that people don't want to feel like they're actually just being told what to listen to by labels. They don't want to feel like they're just, like, cogs in a machine of corporate greed. And so I think there is a little bit more of a backlash because music represents something about who you are in a way that maybe, you know, makeup or coffee does not. For some people, maybe it does. That makes sense. I mean, it's like if I'm looking for, if I want to buy a certain concealer or, I don't know, a type of olive oil, there's a very specific hole, like a use hole in my life that I'm looking for a product or the best product to fill. And that's not how we think about listening to music. It's not like we're necessarily thinking, I must drive. What is a song that could fill that time? Exactly. It's a lot more emotional than that. Like, people listen to music because they love it. People love music. And I think that you have a different relationship to music than you do to most products, and you have a different relationship to listening to music than you do to, like, regular consumption, or at least a lot of us who are fans of music do. So I think that that's kind of why there is this backlash, understanding that some of this stuff is being kind of engineered behind the scenes by record labels. And also I think on social media, the apps have become so, so important to success in the music industry. Like, music and audio is so native to an app like TikTok. You know, it's how new artists, like, build buzz and get signed. It's how they promote their music. It's how, you know, like this year at the Grammys, we saw that every single Best New Artist nominee was someone who had had a big song on TikTok the year before. Like, it's a real marker of success. And I think if it feels like— Music discovery on those platforms is fake, then that success is also, in a way, maybe not fake, but being engineered in a way that feels uncomfortable to people who have, like, a real emotional attachment to the music. I also feel like we see a lot of, like, skepticism with music. Like, people lob accusations that certain artists are industry plants, regardless of whether we even really know what's going on with them. That feels like something that's kind of central to this conversation as well. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think, like, industry plant, nepo baby, there is this sort of cynicism around the music industry, and, like, fans do already kind of have this suspicion that stardom is being highly engineered behind the scenes. And I think when you have something like the Chaotic Good Projects conversation at Billboard, or, you know, when you find out that an influencer who is posting on behalf of a record label without disclosing that it's on behalf of a record label, like, I don't know, I think that that kind of confirms people's suspicion that these narratives are being highly manipulated online. A lot of these artists have real deal fan bases. The Rolling Stones has a real deal fan base. I think we can say that. Even newer artists, right? Like, they do have real fan bases that didn't come from fake burner accounts. Like, even Geese, right? The band, they were at the center of the Chaotic Good controversy, and I could see how those real fans, which the band does have, right, might feel betrayed, perhaps. You know, like, there's also, like, historically been gatekeeping among indie music fans. Totally. Like the stereotype of— Totally. Like the stereotype of a guy who's like, name five songs of theirs. Like someone who believes in keeping some obscurity around their favorite artists, you know? Like what's behind that impulse to keep the borders around a music community closed? And how do these kinds of campaigns interact with that culture? That's a great question. I mean, yeah, I think there is an instinct, particularly in indie music, like you're saying, to gatekeep or to kind of, you know, keep someone as like a hidden secret. There is already this kind of concept of like fake fans, even without the marketing social media layer to it. Like the people who go to the concert because they know the big song and they're there to take pictures and whatever. And I think that that's personally an exclusionary and like not very cool attitude to take towards music. I think we should let everybody enjoy music at the scale that they want to interact with it. I think that that's not cool. Like the people who are like, name five songs, or like if you come to this concert and you only know the hits, like you're not cool, whatever. But it is a very pervasive culture, and I think that these kinds of campaigns might make people upset if like you're trying to get tickets to go see Geese on their next tour and they're already sold out, and there's this fear of like, oh my God, these campaigns are blowing up the band, and it's kind of like main character syndrome because it's like fans thinking like, it's not all people who are as invested in the band as I am. But I think also people don't want to feel like they've been fooled. Like I love Geese, and I do remember there was a moment where it felt like Geese was very, very pervasive on my algorithm. It does make you sort of question, like, oh, do I like this because I like this, or do I like this because I'm being exposed to it every time I open an app on my phone and all of these people that I think are cool also think this is cool? Like it kind of makes you question your personal taste or makes people dig their heels in a little bit. Like, oh no, I was a real fan before Chaotic Good, and, you know. It creates this other level of exclusion. You know, musician Eliza McLam talked about this in her Substack newsletter, but what does this mean for musicians who don't have these paid creators or burner accounts, like lobbying for their virality? I mean, I think it creates an even higher barrier of entry. I think for the musicians that do have access to these kind of marketing tactics, it most likely puts them in a morally difficult position. It must be difficult if you're an artist who wants to be signed to a big label or who wants to have all these resources behind you, for it to then be normalized that, like, this is how we're going to market your music. I can't imagine all artists are happy about that, and, like, I think that creates its own set of complications. And then I think for the artists that don't have that, it's already a difficult industry to break into, you know? It's already inaccessible. There are all these sort of class divides within, like, who is able to sustain a music career at a time when working as a musician is often not a very lucrative career, and even less so if you feel like everybody else has these paid bots, essentially, to make them go viral and to make their music pop off, and you don't have that. I mean, I think it creates an even wider divide between, like, the haves and have-nots of the music industry, and that's a very slippery slope because ultimately I don't think anyone's interested in only having a music industry where only the artists who have these massive campaigns around them are able to be successful and are able to, like, flood the zone. Even the fact that Chaotic Good would be so open about this in an interview, right? That even feels like we've sort of made a turn where it's like the industry doesn't even have to, like, pretend with the audience anymore. It normalizes having these, like, people who probably started out as actual regular music fans turning into billboards for these record companies because they're just getting these offers and, like, the affordability crisis, and it's easy for them to say yes. I was going to say, and I understand why they take the money. Yeah, but it normalizes a system that is maybe not the most beneficial to the artists and, like, the fans that they're looking to connect with, and is maybe not the most beneficial to a creator who genuinely loves music and wants to share music with an audience, and— is now developing a relationship with a label or an agency that raises a lot of, like, ethical and legal questions. You also talked to someone who said that it used to be more hip-hop and R&B songs that labels poured this kind of, like, secret money into, and now it's country. What does that say to you? I think it speaks to how so many of these trends aren't accidents and they're intentional, and we should be aware or at least approach them with some skepticism when it seems like the trends that we are seeing in music or in other forms of art reflect a certain cultural or social agenda. The influencer that told me that, I was really shocked to hear that, like, you know, there was a big movement of, like, bedroom rap and protest music, especially—I mean, I'm thinking during the summer of BLM during 2020, like, hip-hop played such a core part of the musical scene and how we talked about music in, like, a racial and social context. And understanding that there's been a concerted effort from some labels to move away from that and towards country music, which maybe aligns with different political values and a different sociocultural context, I think that that says a lot about the goals of this industry and, like, what kind of politics they're in line with. And it's shocking and I think it's concerning because I think it's easy to look at the charts and be like, Wow, that's crazy that country music all of a sudden is popping off, but it's like these things aren't necessarily happening on accident. Yeah, that is—that's a lot to—that's, like, a lot to really chew on and a lot to think about. How are you thinking about, like, how this reflects sort of where we're at? With, I don't know, whatever era of the internet we're in now. To me, like, what sucks is that the internet used to be a great place to find music through real people. You just followed on, like, I don't know, maybe MySpace or Tumblr, definitely for me. I mean, like, oh my gosh, blog era, blog era internet. It was so good. Yeah. And this kind of paleo stuff we're talking about, it just, it seems like kind of like more dead internet theory. Like, we've discussed this idea on the show before, but for those who don't know, dead internet theory is the idea that the internet is no longer centered on organic human activity, and instead most of the content, interactions, and social media accounts on the internet are actually bots. Like, to put it plainly, dead internet theory posits that a lot of what we see online is fake, right? Fake accounts, fake posts. And that's so at odds with how I used to experience using the internet to discover music. I don't know, like, is the internet just dead? Like, and like this marketing strategy is like another way to deal with that? It feels like it, because I think, to your point, Brittany, like social media in particular used to feel so democratic and fun when it was like you only interacted with the people that you followed. Like, I remember being on Tumblr and Twitter as like a young teenager and like making friends with other people who were like ran fan accounts for a particular pop punk band or for One Direction or whatever. And those communities all felt like real 13-year-old girls behind their computer screens, and it just feels more and more like now so much of what's on our feeds is being programmed for us, and there's not always like a real person with intention on the other side of the screen. Like more often than not, it does feel like it's, I don't know, a record label or a bot or a paid UGC campaign or all these other examples of things that point to dead internet theory where there's an agenda. And it's hard to say, like, who is driving that agenda, but it's lost a lot of its— Humanity. Hmm. I wonder, like, where do you think music discovery is gonna come from next? Like, if people are skeptical of algorithms and now online creators. I feel like we're gonna see a return to the basics, or maybe this is me being Pollyanna about this, but like NTS Radio, college radio, live music, independent communities where people know for a fact that what they're consuming is not being sponsored or influenced. Like, I'm gonna shamelessly plug NPR Music. I love a shameless plug. I appreciate that. NTS Radio, for people who are listening who may not know what that is, can you explain NTS Radio? Yeah. NTS Radio is a global radio network. They're streaming from a bunch of different cities around the world. You can tune in anytime and just hear what different, like, DJs and curators and artists and music fans are listening to in a bunch of different places all over the world. And it's really fun. You can kind of just drop in and, like, feel like you're having this experience outside of your own home, outside of your own bubble, just through your headphones. It's really, really cool. That's really cool. Actually, I was in a bathroom at, like, at a hotel restaurant recently, and they, for some reason, had a gigantic TV in the bathroom, and it was playing NTS Radio, and it was like this, the most industrial sort of—it almost sounded like, it sounded like really old German techno, but whale sounds. Hell yeah. It was a vibe. That's something that I don't think that a record label would pay somebody to talk about online. I think when you were asking earlier about, like, you know, what does this mean for artists who don't have the resources, it does raise all these questions about, like, what if labels don't want to invest in international artists from other parts of the world who aren't in the U.S., or people who make more political music or more experimental music? Like, I think you lose so much richness and diversity if it's not something that labels necessarily want to pay for. And when you go to places like NTS or underground college radio stations or, you know, ask your friends for music recommendations, like, I think we need to go back to making it feel real and human and organic. I love it. Also, like, going to the club. Like, yeah, we need people in the club. You know, that's how people used to hear songs. Just person to person, just actually sharing music too is so nice. Yeah, I think music is such a communal experience and not just when you experience it live. I feel like it means so much to share it with people. I mean, that experience you had with NTS, like you're in the bathroom somewhere, you're in a public place, and a song comes on that, like, catches your ear. Like, that's the magic of, like, listening to music and discovering music and loving music. So I think we just have to, like, keep our ears open and be out in the world. Ah, just keep our ears open. I love that. Isabella, thank you so much for coming on the show. You give me so much to think about, and you give me another excuse to try to go to the club in the middle of the week. So thank you. Thank you for having me. I'll see you at the club. That was Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, reporter for NPR Music. You can find her piece on social media payola on npr.org. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by Nina Patak. Our supervising producer is Shereen Vincent. Our executive producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sangweni. All right, that's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon. This message comes from DonorsChoose. Right now, there's a student that needs something. Maybe it's books, art supplies, or a science kit that will unlock their learning potential. And you can be the reason they get it. With DonorsChoose, you'll fund real classroom projects from real teachers, so your gift goes exactly where it's needed most. Because when students start with what they need, they're ready to build confidence, discover new ideas, and succeed all year long. Give what students need right when they need it at donorschoose.org/local. This message comes from Midi Health. Most women never get real answers about their hormonal health. Midi is changing that with virtual care covered by most major insurances. Understand your hormones. 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