There’s something happening with music. Maybe you’ve noticed it. You’ve no doubt notice how we discover new music. It’s not on the radio or via friend’s recommendations. It’s when you notice the song popping everywhere on TikTok and Instagram, right? A few swipes later, you hear the song again. Now it’s in your head. Now it seems like an interesting part of the zeitgeist. You save the song to your phone.

When this happens, are we discovering new tunes or are we being manipulated? The Atlantic says the answer is most likely the latter, in which case you’ve fallen prey to “trend simulation”. This is “the marketing tactic of paying people online to post opinions they don’t necessarily hold, endorsing music they don’t necessarily care about, so as to trick social-media algorithms—and users—into regarding a band as more popular than it really is.”

The practice became a topic of controversy after a recent Billboard interview in which Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman, two of the founders of the marketing firm Chaotic Good Projects, bragged about their ability to make any musician go viral. They said they can get hundreds of accounts to rave about an SNL performance, or shape what’s being said in comment sections about an album. Spelman described music marketing as an “arms race” for “volume”: “One artist hires us and we run 20 pages for them,” he said. “Someone else will do 25.”

They’ve worked with established names (such as Justin Bieber and Dua Lipa), new stars (Alex Warren, Sombr), and indie darlings alike. A viral Substack post basically mapped out Chaotic Good’s web of influence. Then Wired zeroed in on one client to speculate that the young band’s success was a “psyop.” (But that article caused its own controversy: People really do love Geese’s wild-eyed, rawly thrashing music, and now they’re being told they’ve somehow been duped.)

The Atlantic points out how the evolution of cool has long tracked this cat-and-mouse game between the record business and audiences. “The public may not be tuned into the specifics of the exact marketing strategies helping propel any given musical movement, but we all intuit when innovation congeals into cliché.” When something feels too forced or greedy, no one wants to support that and they say that’s how disco died … is that’s what’s coming for these sped-up tracks made just for 20-second dance routines?

The U.S. confirmed it attacked several military sites in Iran on Thursday in retaliation for “unprovoked attacks.” The strikes came amid a tenuous month-old cease-fire and officials’ statements that the two countries were discussing a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the American blockade on Iranian ports.

President Donald Trump said the ceasefire was still in place. Speaking to reporters during a visit to the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, which he is having renovated, Trump described Iran’s attacks on U.S. destroyers as “a trifle” but “we blew them away.” He added a a deal with Iran “might not happen, but it could happen any day. I believe they want the deal more than I do.”

But the attacks highlighted the fragility of the ceasefire in the area around the Strait of Hormuz, which 20% of the world’s oil used to pass through before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. No ships transited the strait Thursday, the second day in a row that the critical waterway has had no traffic at all, according to NBC News. It’s also the first time ​since March 12-13 that there have been two back-to-back days without marine traffic.

Large public school systems and top universities like Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and Georgetown reported a ransom note signed by a hacking group had appeared on the homepage of their schools’ Canvas sites Thursday. The platform—used by over 8,000 universities and K-12 schools for course websites, assignments and communication—was down for several hours. A hacking group claimed responsibility for a data breach which jeopardized the personal data of hundreds of millions of students and teachers.

Instructure, which provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America, said late Thursday in an alert posted on its website that the software was back available for most users. But the company added that two separate services, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test, remained in maintenance mode.

According to CNN, little is publicly known about ShinyHunters, the hacking group that claimed responsibility for the Canvas outage, but cybersecurity researchers and federal authorities have linked the ShinyHunters name to several instances of high-profile data theft. The group claimed responsibility for hacking Ticketmaster and attempting to sell user data on the dark web in 2024.