There’s No Such Thing as An Industry Plant

All the money in the world can help a musician get seen these days, but that doesn’t mean they’ll become a star. Sometimes it feels like a stranger is being shoved down your throat. What’s an Alex Warren? A Benson Boone? Why do these people that seem so popular mean nothing to me? And how did they get there? Is there a puppeteer somewhere behind the scenes at a major record label telling us who to listen to—and getting rich in the process? Enter the industry plant: Someone whose rise to the top hasn’t been earned, people say, but orchestrated.

It’s a term that’s been tossed around for the past half-decade, applied to just about any musician who seems to have skyrocketed out of obscurity—be it Warren or Boone, or Sombr or Lola Young. New artists cracking an often impenetrable industry are all subject to it, to the point that people will grasp at tenuous straws to find the roots of their success. If they’re not a nepo baby (Lola Young’s aunt wrote The Gruffalo, which people think is the reason “Messy” went viral), then they’re the next worst thing: Manufactured. 

While the lineage of the nepo baby is much easier to trace, the allegations of industry plant-dom are trickier to make sense of. Michael is an A&R (Artist & Repertoire) at a major label. It’s the job of people like him to help discover new talent, nurture them, and help them find their best footing creatively. “If the child of a famous person who has links to the music industry is supremely talented, will the ‘industry’ invest in their talent? It’s likely, yes,” he says. “But the overall concept of an industry plant vastly overestimates the power and influence any of these companies have anymore. Yes, we can invest financial resources into promising talent—however they’re discovered—but it so rarely pays off.”

Instead, what you’re mistaking as “industry plant” behavior is actually the work of good A&Rs and social media strategists, who know exactly who their artist is and the audience they should be speaking to. Many of the people burdened with the “industry plant” label have actually been working at this for ages. Tate McRae’s sudden ascent into pop’s A-Class last summer came with its own whirlwind of allegations, but in reality she’d been signed to her label, RCA, since 2019. Only recently has it started to stick.

Lola Young falls into that category too. I met her back in 2019, and she felt like the same person she is today, but her music sounded different. “The behavior around her early releases was actually far more ‘industry plant,’” Michael argues. “Adele-lite music, big-budget vids, pitched to radio, press coverage, etc.—but it did fuck all.” There’s been a notable shift in how major labels cut costs during the pandemic, dropping artists before they’d realized their full potential. Michael agrees that “any other label would have likely dropped her, but they stuck with her, let her do what she wanted to do, and helped her communicate authentically.” Lo and behold, by the time her debut album came around, bringing “Messy” with it, “it began to connect.” 

When Sombr broke through at the start of the summer, the “industry plant” label followed him too. Tweets to the tune of “I didn’t know who this guy was five minutes ago and now he’s everywhere” flooded timelines. It was, as we noted in our cover story, as if his career had caught fire so suddenly that it couldn’t have been organic. But Sombr—real name Shane Boose—was a songwriter who’d been signed since his first viral hit two years prior and has written independently since. If there’s any sense of something manufactured around him, it’s the ingenious @dailysombr TikTok account that stalks him, capturing him from all angles and making funny content from his performances, red carpets, and footage of him stomping the streets. It looks like a fan account until you realize the access is so good, it must be someone on the inside. It gives fans the insights they want, fuels his fanbase with his goofy behavior, and spares Sombr from having to do it all himself. 

But none of this would matter if the music didn’t work. Is success like this the result of major-label trickery—or rather an understanding that our appetite for algorithm-ticking pop music has been more than satiated, so we need something new? 

Likely the latter. “The job of the industry is just to fan the flames, really,” Michael says. Sarah, a successful music manager, agrees: “Almost everything goes viral by accident,” she says, “which is scary, and why major labels have become so irrelevant.” It’s left to an artist to  find fans by being themselves. And they both agree: “Luck.” 

Perhaps some of these artists seem so unknown to us because we no longer live in a monoculture. There’s never been a greater divide between cultural impact and the forms of success that are easier to quantify. “Look at Brat’s streams versus The Tortured Poet’s Department,” Michael says. For context: Brat was Charli XCX’s biggest debut on Spotify, with 15 million streams on release day. Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department? 300 million. Which of those will have a more lasting legacy in culture?

But perhaps it’s worth asking why we feel the need to express these feelings in the first place. It’s true—everywhere we look, it feels like leg-up privilege is making every industry feel more homogenous, and we’re mad about it. But at the same time, the digitization of stan communities has made being at war with others so easy. “This idea of people being an ‘industry plant’ is reflective of how mean and bitter everyone is online,” Sarah says. “It feels like people are in a collective depression, especially post-COVID, and want to tear others down.” 

So are we right to be cynical every time an artist becomes massively famous with very little notice? I’d argue a little cynicism is always healthy, but it seems like the music that finds us—on TikTok, in the charts, on the radio—is reflective of what people want to hear, even if those people aren’t always us. For shame: Your dad doesn’t know who Addison Rae is, but you can bet he’ll be hearing that Alex Warren dude everywhere.