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For our main lesson this week, we're talking about something I've thought about making a main feed video on for five years—and finally put out this past week. I usually decide against it because it doesn’t make the world better. But what matters is that you know the reality of what is happening in music marketing today. That’s what you pay me for. So, today we’re talking about Astroturfing.

So, for those of you who do not know this term, it is named after the fake grass you will see on a football field. With that said, I’m just going to give you a masterclass in what I’ve seen. This is actually how a lot of groups have gotten their first bit of momentum. It’s how plenty of artists have sparked that early ignition.

Now, you don’t always need to keep Astroturfing once there’s a real sense of rabidity—once it feels authentic and fans start driving the conversation themselves. But I have to say, it’s often the thing that helps get the right discussions going in the first place.

It’s something I’ve become fully convinced of.

You Don’t Even Catch It

Recently, I was talking to a very smart author, and they were talking about how often you don’t even realize you might be talking to an astroturfer on the internet. And I was thinking about it: there are so many times on these Twitter threads where I’ll see a theory thrown around about why an artist did or said something. And I’m like, one of these is probably someone on their team, with their fake account. We discussed this in great deal last week.

GAYLE’s Obvious Astroturfing Promoting “abcdefu”

@gaylecantspell

Reply to @nancy_berman definitely not based off personal experience... #orginalsong #newmusic #plslikethisaccount #hastagsworkapparently #acoustic

You know, a thing I think of all the time—for example, GAYLE. When she went viral for astroturfing their “abcdefu” song, it eventually came out because they did a terrible job of hiding it. The probing comment she was responding to in her TikTok that went viral was from Nancy Berman. Who, of course, is a marketer at Atlantic, which GAYLE was signed to.

That is Astroturfing.

They came up with the idea, did it, and got caught. The internet is very good at detective work.

How It Works

So this is all to say: one of the primary purposes of astroturfing is to create what looks like authentic behavior while steering the conversation in the direction you want.

One of the most common examples is going in from a separate account and commenting something like, “Oh my God, what song is playing?” It sparks curiosity. That bit of intrigue goes a long way, significantly when it’s dropped into a video that doesn’t obviously look like a music promo. Whether it’s a friend doing it or you’re doing it yourself, that’s astroturfing.

And a lot of you ask me, “How do I post my promotional stuff in Reddit threads or Discords without it feeling forced?” On private calls, I say this all the time: the way you do it, most of the time, is through astroturfing.

Best Practices

6 :: 1 Rule

So what are the rules then for not getting caught for astroturfing? I have a six-to-one rule on Reddit.

So, on Reddit, you can click a person's profile to see what they've been posting. I didn't pretend not to be me. I've had probably 10 different accounts over the years. People can see what you're doing. They can look it up and know whether you're being authentic or not.

I post as Musformation as myself. I've had other ones. And what I do is a six-to-one rule (or sometimes four-to-one) rule: I’ll do six posts where I share something else that’s not about what I’m trying to astroturf for every one post I make.

So, a good example when I was starting out is that I would share lots of other people's music production videos. I would share helpful articles I read on the music business, and then drop my videos into what would look like, from my astroturf accounts, I was just somebody who did a lot of sharing and was a good member of the community.

But some of them would get burned over time. Some people would figure out what I was doing because people are good internet detectives.

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