The curtain between music fans and the music industry is falling. At SXSW last month, Billboard hosted a podcast Q&A with the founders Chaotic Good Projects, a marketing agency that utilizes digital astroturfing to help artists go viral. A few weeks later, singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb drew attention to the company in a Substack post. Wired followed up this week with a widely shared article calling the fanfare around indie rock sensations Geese, for whom Chaotic Good claims to have engineered campaigns, a "psyop." The ensuing discourse has been unruly, with arguments for and against this evolution of music marketing. One question being asked is: What about artists who can't afford to hire firms to manipulate the algorithm? Coincidentally on Reddit this week, Hiroki Tanaka detailed his demoralizing experience with a more traditional campaign for his new solo album.
Tanaka is the former lead guitarist for Canadian experimental prog group Yamantaka // Sonic Titan. "I’m struggling to process a massive disconnect and need some perspective from other career artists," the r/musicians post began. He continued:
I’ve been in the industry for twenty years with past awards and recognition from my previous band. This solo album was meant to be my "last hurrah"—the project where I finally did everything by the book to see if it could work. I had a manager, a label, and I hired a professional PR firm (in my country we can get grants for this).
Ultimately it dropped last week and it’s been a weak trickle after almost 8 months of campaigning!! 2k streams across the entire project as of this posting (and this was 8 months of promotional shows, PR work, waterfall playlisting via The Orchard, etc etc)
Definitely some takeaways:
I thought a manager would have a holistic view of how to grow my career. Instead, the focus was almost entirely on the "waterfall" and trying to juice streaming metrics that didn't exist. Admittedly a manager can’t build a fire; they can only fan the flames of a fanbase that is already there. Moving from a known band to a solo project meant I had no existing momentum for them to leverage, but I thought he would take that into account.
My PR was also too trad, and my management and PR were butting heads. PR wanted a 3 single trad campaign, but my manager wanted the waterfall and we ended up doing a weird hybrid of both... didn’t really pan out for streaming or press in the end.
Probably the biggest drawback is that I’m not a “natural” content creator. I put out an "old-fashioned," concept album project into a system that only rewards viral hooks. The traditional PR + Waterfall strategy feels completely broken for someone in my position. I did try and even started a TikTok account (weird for an aging millennial to do, and a little “cringe” as they say) but I have a family and a job, and I don’t really have the time or energy to invest in social media and I just couldn’t really come to enjoy the process of making content.
I would post live show vids, BTS of my MV, goofy meme shit... none of it really took off, and just made me feel like I was wearing a big glowing neon sign on a street corner.
I’m so demoralized I don’t even want to do my release show. It very much feels like an album that I (and some industry folk) really thought would find an audience, hasn’t. A bit like a rug being pulled out from under me.
Anyway, I’m gonna go apprentice to be a plumber now cause I’m tired of being broke and got two kids and a family and rent.
I see other industries like film and TV, where they still buffer and support non-commercial indie films. I think music industry has completely lost that capacity.
Apologies I guess this was mostly a rant.
About the 11-track LP, the musician previously said:
In order to explore my complex heritage as a descendant of Christian missionaries, I felt compelled to write songs that took the melodic, harmonic, and thematic material from hymns in a Japanese hymnbook I inherited from my grandparents. As an atheist, I wanted to explore biblical themes from a more scholarly, and secular, perspective. Much like how Michael Ondaatje based In The Skin of a Lion off of the Epic of Gilgamesh, I researched the hymns, proverbs, and passages in The Bible, and used that as a launchpad for my own songwriting.
Isan was released last week and has one supporter listed on Bandcamp so far. You can purchase it — or at least check it out — right here. With any luck, his post about the failed marketing campaign could ironically yield some buzz in the unforgiving attention economy.
As part of the rollout, Tanaka also launched a Substack of his own. "A newsletter just feels like shouting into the void, but as an artist, I am 'supposed' to have one," he began the most recent post, from February. It's about Geese.
