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The Red Thread This Week:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." — Richard Feynman
A good friend of mine and musician, sent me a post this week about the Brooklyn rock band Geese.
I think his take on the news was a combination of "Gross…” and “But, is this how it works now?"
We had a good back and forth, and it was enough to kick off the writing here.
See, Geese is a band that’s been grinding away since 2016. Released four albums. Then last year, seemingly out of nowhere, they exploded.
Sold-out tours. SNL. Coachella. The Guardian called them the new saviors of rock.
Except a fair amount of that explosion was manufactured in a way that some fans weren’t ready to hear.
A marketing firm called Chaotic Good Projects has been running networks of TikTok pages to push Geese's music into the recommendation algorithm.
Burner accounts
Fabricated comments
Engineered virality
The firm's co-founders went on Bill Simmons' podcast recently and said it plainly: "We can drive impressions on anything at this point. Everything on the internet is fake."
They offered up a name for their approach; “Trend Simulation.”
As musician Eliza McLamb put it in her widely shared, thoughtful piece about it, “If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome.”
My day job has been in recorded music/music-tech for 25+ years, but I try not to write too much about that work here, at the risk of not being able to stop.
But this story is worth sitting with, because it isn't new, or unique to music.
After all, it’s the same game the music industry has been running since the invention of radio. Payola, just with new tactics and mechanics.
Pay the gatekeeper, get the placement, manufacture the demand.
As Paste Magazine described it, “Congratulations, you discovered digital marketing.”
But it’s the question sitting underneath that every builder working to grow their business or their art should be sitting with right now.
So, the Red Thread this week is about short-term vs. long-term. Who you're optimizing your work for, and across what timeline.
Both can be economically viable, depending on what you're measuring. But only one has you building something meaningful and durable.
~ Jaime
🔑 The Unlock
Who’s Your Customer?
In the early days of broadcast radio, the record labels figured something out fast.
The listener wasn't the customer. The radio station was.
Take care of the station, the station plays your record, the listeners show up, the cash register rings.
Decades of promotional infrastructure got built around that single insight.
It also gave us decades of payola scandals, because when the gatekeeper becomes the customer, you start optimizing for the gatekeeper instead of the people you're actually claiming to serve.
Chaotic Good Projects isn't doing anything structurally different. They just swapped the radio station for the TikTok algorithm.
Feed the machine the right signals, the machine surfaces your music to more people, and those people feel they discovered something organically.
In actuality, those people were served something engineered to look organic.
These plays work. They move product. They generate revenue. By the narrow definition of success as "did it make money," they pass the test.
But they're playing a short-term game with a long-term cost. And the cost shows up later, when the campaign ends or the algorithm shifts, or the audience figures out they were nudged.
1️⃣ The Algorithm isn’t Your Customer
You can optimize for the platform. Chase the trending format. Post at the right time.
Use the hooks the machine rewards. Structure everything to satisfy what gets amplified on social media.
Or…you can optimize for the person on the other end.
These two things might overlap sometimes, but they are not the same thing.
If your strategy is primarily designed to satisfy an algorithm, you are renting attention from a platform built to profit from that attention.
The moment the algorithm shifts, or the platform reprioritizes, your audience evaporates. Because it was never yours.
For builders: Look at your last ten pieces of content. Which audience was each one was built for. The platform, or the person you’re trying to serve?
2️⃣ Manufactured Demand Has a Half-Life
What Chaotic Good did for Geese created the appearance of organic demand where none existed. Thousands of fake interactions nudged real people toward music they might never have found otherwise. It worked. For a while.
Manufactured demand has a shelf life. When the campaign stops, many of the “fans” who were nudged by an invisible hand don't stick.
Attention can be purchased, gamed, or manufactured, but trust can't (at least not very easily.)
Trust gets earned over time through consistent delivery of work that's actually worth someone's attention. And that’s a long game.
It's slower. It's also the only game where what you build has a chance to be meaningful, and last.
For builders: If you turned off every paid channel, every growth tactic, every algorithmic optimization tomorrow, would anyone notice? Who would come looking for you?
That's the test. Not how big your audience is. How much they would miss you if you were gone.
💡 Mindset Shift
Out-Deliver
It’s tempting to game your way to instant results today.
The instinct is understandable. Building real audience, and real customers is slow. It's unglamorous.
The results compound over time, which means you're often doing the work long before you see the payoff.
Manufacturing demand is faster. It's measurable. It looks like progress on a dashboard somewhere.
But it optimizes for short-term “wins” at the expense of long-term trust. And trust, once lost (or never built,) is brutally expensive to earn back.
The builders who win over time own the relationship with their audience directly.
They earn attention through the quality of what they deliver, and they build on ground they control.
You can't out-game everyone. You can out-deliver almost anyone.
Need Help With This?
If you're publishing content to grow your business, but something’s not working, I can help.
I work with operators to build systems around their content marketing to help uncover:
Where their real audience lives
How to build distribution infrastructure they control
Which platforms to invest in and which ones are a tax
If a quick back and forth would be helpful, hit reply and say “hi.”
I read every message, and I’m sure we'd have a good conversation.
~ Jaime
🎲 Prompt Playground
The Audience Quality Audit
Use this to evaluate whether you're building real demand or just renting attention.
Copy + paste this prompt into your AI tool of choice:
Prompt
You are a media strategist helping me evaluate the quality and durability of my audience.
My Context:
What I do: [describe your business]
Who I serve: [specific audience]
Primary content formats: [newsletter, podcast, social, video, etc.]
Primary distribution channels: [where my audience finds me]
Estimated percentage of my audience that comes through platforms I don't control: [estimate]
Help me evaluate:
Platform Dependency. How exposed am I if my primary platform changes its algorithm or policies? What's my contingency?
Owned vs. Rented. What percentage of my audience relationship do I actually own (email list, direct subscribers) versus rent (social followers, algorithmic reach)?
The Disappearance Test. If I went silent for 30 days, who would notice and come looking? What does that tell me about my real audience versus my metric audience?
Demand Quality. Is the demand for my work organic (people seek me out) or assisted (people find me through algorithmic placement)? How can I tell the difference?
Foundation Check. What's the single most important change I should make to make my audience more durable and less platform-dependent?
Be direct. Tell me what I need to hear.
✅ Bonus Prompt
Take whatever the audit surfaces as the most important issue, and run it through this:
Based on what we just discussed, design a 90-day plan to shift 20% of my audience from rented to owned. Be specific about which channels to lean into, which to deprioritize, and what to measure each month so I know it's working.
⚡ Before You Go
Need a new podcast?
I co-host Slackers with Jonathan Sasse, a show for leaders, builders, and creators who want to make work better.
We just wrapped season 1 and cross my heart, if you want to deliver better work, it’s worth a test drive.
Here are other ways I can help:
🗓️ 1:1 call: Grab 15min on my calendar.
🎙️ Podcast support: Get pro-level guidance without hiring full-time.
🚀 Speaking & workshops: Hit reply, let’s talk.
🤖 AI Prompt Library: 12 prompts to use AI as a strategic thinking partner (free)
And I’d appreciate your help:
🧶 Take a 2-minute survey to help improve the newsletter.
💬 Leave a short testimonial if this newsletter has helped your work.
Both make a real difference.
Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here.
~ Jaime