Vulture reports Justin Bieber's Coachella shows were promoted via suspicious Discord campaigns, offering creators up to $1 per 1,000 views for clips. Bieber's name also appeared on controversial marketing agency Chaotic Good Projects' client list before removal.

In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber's Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a 1$ per 1000 views.

And yet his fans were bragging about how he didn't need stunts to pull views

Anyone who thought this was organic was fooling themselves

I remember how atrl used him to attack Taylor

But this viral moment effectively launched KatyMania?

I always knew this. I will never forgive him for this. He is beyond.

Wow that is insane.

Now how can we sign up our faves on this service?

Well now it all makes sense. I was wondering why so many people were praising this garbage performance.

Nothing on the internet is organic anymore

8 minutes ago, FolkLover1989 said:

Anyone who thought this was organic was fooling themselves

I remember how atrl used him to attack Taylor

and this is just one agency/tactic they used, i wonder how many more there are out there

Edited May 18May 18 by rock god

23 minutes ago, Evenstar said:

Nothing on the internet is organic anymore

Who seriously believed over 7mio people streamed BEAUTY AND THE BEA(S)T for weeks on?!?! I mean cmon, thats just bs.

Thats why streaming in general cannot be taken seriously. Its all FRAUDULENT

31 minutes ago, FolkLover1989 said:

Anyone who thought this was organic was fooling themselves

I remember how atrl used him to attack Taylor

We would have used somebody else anyway

but Barbz told me Bloated and the Boar was trending because of their fave. what happened?

woah and it worked

kinda want that fraudulence with ariana

Not surprising. Somebody is paying for most things that pop up in your algorithm.

People dragging Justin Bieber like their faves PR team aren't doing the exact same thing

The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show. In March, Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman, co-founders of the digital music-promotion agency Chaotic Good Projects, gave a live interview to a Billboard reporter at South by Southwest in which they breezily described using sock-puppet accounts to manufacture enthusiasm for artists at every level of the music industry, from major-label pop stars to niche indie acts. Spelman called the practice "trend simulation." His motto: "Everything on the internet is fake."

Edited May 18May 18 by Soul Grabber

Is he doing Rio in 2027?

i wonder if he broke even

Edited May 18May 18 by plum

This isn't necessarily 'fraud'. These days, if something doesn't appear on our algorithms, it's like it never happened. You can just never find out something major happened.

If people do not do stunts/tactics like this, they will never succeed.

It's just the modern version of paying newspapers and major outlets to report on events.

I don't agree with it, but it is what it is.

Edited May 18May 18 by Saintlor

it was kinda obvious when so many people were posting "Bieberchella" when he had the most boring Coachella performance the festival has ever had

Edited May 18May 18 by Sabrina Carpenter

I'm just confused as to why you'd devote so much effort and resources to an artist who has basically given up on himself and his career at this point? What a waste of time

Everything these days is "bots" whether its success or alleged hate campaign conspiracies, but the question is why don't bots work for everyone?

8 minutes ago, KFC said:

I'm just confused as to why you'd devote so much effort and resources to an artist who has basically given up on himself and his career at this point? What a waste of time

The company that bought his catalog is making the money though so they have every incentive to drive more attention to his catalog.

13 minutes ago, RihannaRTT said:

Everything these days is "bots" whether its success or alleged hate campaign conspiracies, but the question is why don't bots work for everyone?

because its not that those viral moments aren't real, they mostly are, but instigation is artificial. sometimes you can force something going viral, sometimes you can't. and if subject is already very prominent, then it can snowball very quickly into either direction.

this tactic isn't new and been issue on reddit for years. it is well established that one actor (either group of people or one person with multiple accounts) can shape the narrative in given thread with very early comments. and this is the main problem - imagine post that has million of views, thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments being influenced just by one actor. now scale it million times for every major social media.

Edited May 18May 18 by piotrert

Yeah, the hype leading up to his Coachella performance did seem a bit fabricated and forced, but like, no amount of bts shenanigans or PR strategies can make your streams increase like five-fold due to one performance, or make the festival tickets sell out the way they did, unlike previous years.

Fake hype or not, clearly the performance resonated with the GP and that's as organic as it gets.

Explain why when I came across a post from the official Coachella Youtube with a pic of Justin, there were hundreds of comments from just a few accounts, commenting similar praises, just minutes apart