Worth noting that “fake it till you make it” is a very old/well established strategy in the music world, it’s just being applied to social media. For example, read about some of the things David Bowie’s manager Tony DeFries did. Before Bowie was remotely famous, DeFries hired body guards for Bowie just to give him an aura of fame, had him drive around in stretch limos, hosted lavish after-parties after shows even when he was a nobody, leveraged curiosity about all of this into interviews with reporters at fancy hotels, etc.

The strategy was to make him appear to be famous until he actually became famous, and it worked. Exactly what people confide to do today on social.

It's as old as the music industry itself. The Police's hit single "Roxanne" was labelled by A&M (their record company) as "banned by the BBC" in the UK even though it was never banned...just not playlisted. Drummer Stewart Copeland later admitted, "We got a lot of mileage out of it being supposedly banned by the BBC."

Yep -- in fact, this might be another facet of the same scam. From the ProPublica article:

> The source said they also worked to ensure a client’s Google search results would present them as a musician. Google itself proved helpful in this regard. Once articles and music profiles were indexed by Google’s search engine, the site generated a “knowledge panel” in search results for the person’s name.

I came here to note the same connection. I forwarded both articles to a spam person at Google.