r/indieheads Calls Out Indie Labels for Astroturfing on Reddit
"We are not going to reveal who those labels are at this time, but it was disappointing to find them engaging with our subreddit with a near-total lack of transparency"
BY
Megan LaPierre
Published
May 4, 2026
Wherever you land on the whole
Geese psyop allegations
thing, we can all agree that
WIRED
's article was informative in shedding light on the icky kinds of marketing strategies being used by big pop stars and indie artists — or, perhaps more accurately, their teams — alike to compete for algorithmic attention online.
Moderators for r/indieheads, the largest indie music community on Reddit, have now
called out indie record labels for astroturfing
on the subreddit.
"After some investigation, we have noticed an influx of accounts run by record labels on the subreddit attempting to blend in with our regular user base, usually only posting or commenting about artists/bands that are on the labels they work for," they wrote in a statement issued late last week.
The statement continued, "We are not going to reveal who these labels are at this time, 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)."
Going forward, the mods will allow labels and distributors, verified by themselves or Reddit, to post and comment, so long as they follow the rules — and any anonymous accounts run by labels, posting about the artists they represent, will be permanently banned upon discovery, as well as likely excluded from future verification.
Any labels interested in being verified to post in r/indieheads are being encouraged to
message the mods
directly. (Reddit is currently running an
alpha test of verified profiles
, which have cropped up on this subreddit in particular, mostly in the form of news organizations like
WIRED
and
Far Out Magazine
; posting a link to an Exclaim! article from a non-verified account, for example, is banned.)
Some users in the comments' section are encouraging the moderators to name the labels, while others are suggesting that they probably would've been prevalent posters in the "new album" threads that drop on Thursday nights.
"There's a reason why Chaotic Good and other marketing companies like them are targeting platforms like TikTok over Reddit, because you cannot easily manipulate trends here like you can there," the mods' statement added. "Or at the very least, you cannot easily manipulate trends on our subreddit, as that's due to the hard work of not only our mod team, but our userbase who have been very good at sniffing out bullshit."
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