James Blake says the industry's fake.

"Can't trust a review because blogs/mags stop making money, so journalists now get paid off by labels. Can't trust a comment section cause it's full of fake fan accounts saying 'omg, their voice' to create bandwagon effect. Can't trust YouTube numbers because labels buy them. Can't trust streaming numbers because labels pay for bot farms to drive discovery. Can't even trust that a song was made by human beings. If you're an artist, remember that in 2026, there's not a single part of the system that isn't fake. You're probably doing better than you think."

Look, this post has ruffled a lot of feathers.

While James may be a bit hyperbolic, because certainly there are elements of the music industry today that are very real, there are still some real fans making positive comments and buying tickets and actually showing up to a real performance. But we are seeing an increasing level of fake shit on all levels every day.

The problem isn't so much that there's more inauthenticity than authenticity across the board, but there's enough of everything James just listed here to be stumbling across it on a regular basis. And at first glance, it's becoming harder to tell what's true and what isn't.

I don't think the goal is to astroturf the entire music industry, but rather to create so much confusion that people don't trust anything. And as a result, you just sort of feed into this awful kind of nihilism or just allow the algorithm and the gatekeepers to decide what you should like for you because figuring it out for yourself seems too difficult.

Again, I know not everyone may have liked this post, but James was making some fair points here.