How does music become "popular" ?

Do you ever get the sense that many of the so-called mainstream pop stars whose images you unwittingly encounter dozens of times a day aren’t as “mainstream” or “popular” as you’re told they are? Do you give one eighth of a fuck about Dua Lipa, Zara Larsson, Childish Gambino, Bebe Rexha, or Shawn Mendes? Does your mother? Your little cousin? Your boss? The person delivering your mail? Your barista? Have you (or has anyone close to you) ever spent real money on anything these artists are selling? Do you, or anyone around you, follow them with any interest in what they make or do?...

And Spelman said: “In the past, a label and management team would do a great job getting their artist on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J, post it, and then kind of wait, and the comments would come in: terrible cover choice, voice sounds terrible, all that. What we do at Chaotic Good with our management clients is this: the second the SNL performance drops at midnight, you should post one hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year. The question is how you do that at scale. It takes a lot of work and infrastructure, but controlling the narrative is really, really important.”...

This is precisely how contemporary digital-music marketing operates, less as targeted exposure or coercion and more as the quiet reconstruction of the conditions under which discovery appears to occur. Not by introducing music to listeners but by staging the conditions in which it feels as though it arrived on its own.

More details in the "Getting Shilled" article in the June issue of Harper's Magazine.