In the latest music marketing saga, the popular Reddit subreddit r/indieheads has banned record labels from its community. Moderators investigated an influx of new, anonymous members to the online community. They discovered that these anonymous users were actually record labels posing as Reddit users through burner accounts.
These accounts only seemed to comment on posts about specific artists. The investigation revealed that these artists were all on the labels’ rosters. Using anonymous Reddit accounts, they were promoting their clients in an environment that’s supposed to thrive on organic interaction.
“We’re not going to reveal who these labels are at this time,” one of the r/indieheads moderators wrote in an Instagram post. “But it was disappointing to find them engaging with our subreddit with a near-total lack of transparency (and it was disappointing for me personally finding out how long some of these accounts had been operating).”
Indie Subreddit Bans Anonymous Accounts After Finding Record Labels Promoting Their Artists
The subreddit moderator explained that they’re banning anonymous accounts run by record labels using the community to promote their roster. Record labels with Reddit accounts in general aren’t automatically banned, however. But they must have an account verified through Reddit’s recent process, which gives them a public verification badge. Or, through the subreddit mods.
This policy change, said the moderator, is an attempt to curtail labels and PR firms from purposefully trying to shift music trends online. Does this sound familiar? Because it should, what with the discourse surrounding alt-rock band Geese’s rise to stardom still hanging around.
PR and marketing teams posing as fan accounts on Instagram and pushing band content in the endless scroll is the same as record labels using anonymous Reddit accounts to push their artists in an indie subreddit. It all comes down to “How viral can this song go?” or “How many people can we get to click this link?”
If one thing is true, it’s that there’s a deeper, underlying issue here
And the people who are mad at the bands for hiring a marketing team are pointing their anger in the wrong direction. It’s capitalism that you hate. Not Geese, and not every other popular band that’s ever been accused of being an industry plant.
“There’s a reason why [marketing companies] are targeting platforms like TikTok over Reddit,” one r/indieheads user commented. “Because you cannot easily manipulate trends here like you can there.”
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