Dennis de Groot

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be @punchdouble on most other platforms.

Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show. 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 dollar per thousand views. “On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown. “Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.” Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: nymag.visitlink.me/w6Bu9N

Everyone is talking about music marketing. After digital agency Chaotic Good went viral for explaining their approach in detail, music fans across the internet started to wonder if everything they knew and loved about their favorite artists was faked, duped, or planted...a psyop. To get a clearer picture of what music marketing looks like in 2026 and demystify a polarizing topic, we spoke with eight industry experts and insiders to hear their takes. By @Will_Schube Read: pigeonsandplanes.com/read/what-is-m…

Everybody is making the same content to promote completely different music.

@BrianZisook Or release just about every song as a single first.

Longer albums underperform for emerging artists because they don't have enough listeners who care enough yet to justify the runtime. When people stop listening, skip rates go up, and the algorithm buries the music. So if you insist on releasing albums, shorter is better.

Perfect song of the day: anaiis - My World (beyond) youtu.be/KWCE0_BAfL8?is…

Perfect song of the day: The Internet - Hold On youtu.be/z8Kr_aFB6Ww?is…

But where are Billy Joel, Raphael Saadiq, Gamble & Huff, Tom Waits, Sufjan Stevens, and SZA?

@mimitheblogger Real. Congrats on finding some much needed peace.

I said I’d never get a 9–5. I meant it too btw!! But six months ago, I walked into Ogilvy, broke, proud, and coming out of a season I didn’t have the language for yet. The freelance life looked good on the outside, but behind the scenes I was on UC, holding it together with faith and performance. Something had to give. And it did. This isn’t a “I sold out” story. It’s a “I surrendered and found peace” one. In the last six months, I’ve paid my bills consistently. Led creative on shoots. Found structure again. Found people again. Found MYSELF again. And somewhere in the middle of all that, God stripped the noise out of me. Comparison. Ego. Pressure to be seen. Gone quiet. I also just finished a 21-day Daniel fast (yay). And it reminded me of something simple. I can do hard things. I just needed to come back to myself properly. Now I’m here. 9–5. Still writing. Still building Mimi the Music Blogger. Still called. All at the same time. Nothing I went through was wasted. Not the broke era. Not the pride. Not the breakdown. It all makes sense now. New Substack post is up. This one has layers. 🔗 - open.substack.com/pub/mimithemus…

@OmariJazz .@kingbritt’s @blacktronika

is there anything even close to Red bull music academy happening anymore?

@iamntyrell @KarenNyameKG I genuinely believe that has a lot to do with mainstream local media not supporting new local music enough.

I find the tension between global conversations regarding a local product/scene/sound/artist vs local conversations to be interesting, because there’s repeated chatter on this side about UK music being stagnant while globally all eyes are literally on us right now for innovation

Europe and UK dates kick off this week. Get your tickets at makayamccraven.com/offtherecord

I'd argue that sequencing is what makes an album an album and not just a collection of random songs.

Eh, I don’t know, but this seems like an appropriate time for DSPs to finally take his music down.

.@momoboydmusic "Oops" needs a @TeezoTouchdown remix. Where you at @amalwtf?

@SunshineDBaby Let’s go!

I’m like 4 days from exposing half the music industry and how certain departments function when it comes to women of color….

Vanity metrics and statistics have ruined the music industry. Society even.

so we’ve talked about Chaotic Good, next are we going to talk about the TikTok/IG “music discovery” curators who get paid to post?

It is insane that this is how society is

Not enough people with morals in the music industry.

if we’re being real, half of the things we do in the music industry to push music probably should be either regulated heavily or be made illegal

for my @nytimes debut, i wrote about Kanye &his new, endlessly forgiving core fanbase