No, Your Least Favourite Musician is Not an Industry Plant

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | August 9, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | August 9, 2024 |

It’s hard to make it in the music industry. Corporate entities control so much of what we hear and how we listen to it. It’s expensive to tour and get your work out there independently, and it’s only gotten harder post-lockdown and after Brexit. If you aren’t born into the right family or connected in the right way, it might be impossible for you to rise beyond the depths of Soundcloud obscurity. It’s frustrating, more so as it seems like art as a whole has become the playground for old money, tech bro jerks, and AI plagiarism. An article from The Guardian last month delved into some potentially shady dealings from Spotify, the current king of music streaming. Music fans have gotten increasingly confused about why the same songs keep coming up in their autoplay queues and random playlists. It didn’t take long for such things to get highly conspiratorial, and the favoured insult du jour reared its ugly head - industry plant.

If you believe the randos of social media, everyone they dislike is an industry plant: Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Ice Spice, Lana del Rey, H.E.R., Olivia Rodrigo, Bebe Rexha, Greta Van Fleet, and many more. We used to just say that people whose music we didn’t like sucked. Now we declare them to be part of a corporate agenda that betrays the supposed authenticity they have sold themselves on to us gullible listeners.

‘Industry plant’ is a term used to describe musicians who are perceived to have gotten popular through means unrelated to their talent. It might be nepotism, familial wealth, or industry connection, or it could be something as nefarious as streaming fraud or payola. If you’re viewed as having an image of relatability and scrappy indie authenticity but it turns out you care a lot about your career and succeeding, prepare to be called a plant.

It’s to the surprise of nobody that this insult is largely directed towards women. Eilish, who became very famous very quickly as a teenager through music she made in her bedroom with her brother, has been frequently scolded for having a supposedly inauthentic story. A talented adolescent who was still finding her feet amid scary levels of pop culture visibility was accused of being manufactured and lying about her true self. Eilish is now a bona fide megastar and still gets this insult lobbed at her. Lately, Chappell Roan’s rise to the top has led to industry plant cries, despite the fact that there’s nothing the mainstream music industry would care about less than a gay woman who dresses in Divine drag, smokes pot on stage, and caters largely to queer audiences. Never mind that, until last year, she was still working as a summer camp counsellor to pay the bills. Olivia Rodrigo’s status as a Disney Channel star made it easy to proclaim her a plant, while Ice Spice’s TikTok-friendly bops and palatable image were the stuff of demons to ‘real’ rap fans. Lord forbid a woman do anything, right?

In a business where it’s never been more visible how the strings are being pulled, to be called an industry plant is the ultimate insult. We see every day how record labels and artists pump out multiple versions of the same song to game the Billboard charts, or watch as singers admit they’re being forced to use social media for promotional purposes. It’s a cold calculating thing, to make yourself a star, and authenticity often has little to do with it. Besides, like the trap of relatability, being ‘real’ has a wobbly definition with moving goalposts dictated by whoever is the loudest voice at any given moment. You could have been born in the gutter and made your way to the top of the pile, and there will still be someone who’s convinced you only got there because a shadowy force decided it for you.

Conspiracies like this are easy to latch onto because it’s no secret that the music industry sucks. Spotify is a monopolistic force that bleeds artists dry and largely seems beholden to the most powerful record labels. Ticketmaster and Live Nation have so wholly devoured the world of concerts that the U.S. Government is now suing them. As that Guardian piece detailed, Spotify’s ‘discovery mode’ feature ‘allows artists to forgo a portion of their royalties in order to receive a boost in algorithm-led zones of the app such as the autoplay queue, radio, and mixes.’ It’s not technically payola but it sure does feel like it, right? And it’s not as though these musicians were ever cashing in big time with their $0.003 per stream. Are these the only options? Pander to a broken system or die?

So, whenever someone bucks the trend, or whenever they get a fairytale-esque leap to the top, suspicions are aroused. If Spotify has that kind of ability to elevate an artist, do they wield that power to blacklist others? The big promise of the internet was the democratizing of everything, from art to politics to opinion. That was always a lie but it’s certainly become more evident that the tools of change were quickly co-opted by established powers to reinforce a cultural status quo. The music industry is no different. You can’t blame artists who would want to play the game. Some of them are extremely good at it too, as Taylor Swift’s endless assembly line of variant single releases can attest to.

We’re always crying out for authenticity of some kind. Who could blame us when we’re swamped under generative AI crap and those same evil platforms seem eager to welcome this barrage of slop (there’s a weird about of AI music on Spotify, just saying.) But it’s telling that cries of fakeness and agenda-ridden manipulations are so frequently directed towards women who dare to be both good at their jobs and eager to have more than a few dozen SoundCloud listeners in their corner. There’s still this expectation that artists of any kind should be proudly starving and their ambitions tempered because it’s not a ‘real job’ to most of the world. Not playing the game is an option, but not paying your bills is less so. Then again, it’s not like the so-called plants are being nurtured anymore financially by their record-label gardeners. It’s exploitation all the way down.