How do you tell if an artist is an industry plant?

To be quite honest, I myself am not sure. But, I do take pleasure in theorizing, which is why I am bringing you this blog post. In a country where "innocent until proven guilty" reigns supreme and circumstancial evidence is hit or miss, it may be impossible to give a definitive anwer. However, I hope to propose a reasonable case study. Or at the very least, amuse you.

Ice Spice. If you've heard of her before, you're probably laughing to yourself right now. If you haven't, you may be trying to recall the names of each individual Spice Girl, or perhaps wondering if Old Spice has released a new scent of deodorant. What you should know is that Ice Spice is a rapper (and I use that term very loosely here) that took the world by storm circa 2022. My Christian morals would tell you it is best not to look into her music... It is not the topic of discussion here anyway. The important part is that she seemed to emerge out of nowhere: one minute I had never heard her name, the next I heard that she was playing sold-out shows on a world tour. I'm not super into the rap scene so perhaps her fame was a long-time coming, but it was strange to me that I, someone who is vested in popular culture, had never even heard this person's name once. But it didn't stop with her suddenly topping the charts.

TikTok has changed the music industry. That is common knowledge at this point. People can blow up at the drop of a hat. What made Ice Spice so intriguing was not her instant fame; this sort of thing is common in the 2020s. It was the fact that she seemed to have huge brand deals faster than any person I have ever seen. Not being an influencer for some tiny online boutique either. Within weeks of me hearing about her, she had a drink named after her at Dunkin'. The biggest shock for me came at the release of Taylor Swift's Midnights Deluxe album. I am by no means a Swiftie, but I do recognize Swift's insane impact on the music industry. When the pop star announced on her Instagram that she was releasing a version of one of her songs with Ice Spice and how much she loved the rapper's music, I started to get more suspicious than ever. Why did Swift act like she had been following Ice Spice for so long and that it was some sort of dream of hers to collaborate when Ice Spice had only become popular within the last few months? And Swift's album had just come out, so the deluxe edition had to have been made several months in advance... The timeline was not adding up for me.

Even stranger still was a model I saw on the Target website. I literally did a double take when I saw a young woman modeling jeans that looked remarkably like the young rapper. I had never seen anyone like her on the website before (and I, like most of Gen Z, had spent quite a while online shopping at Target). Suddenly, almost immediately after a woman with a very distinct appearance launches into fame, models just happen to pop up that look just like her? It was all too weird for me.

Apparently, many others have asked the same question; so much so that others have written articles on this very topic. Though the writer of this article strongly disagrees with me, it seems the only evidence he presents is that many of those believing Ice Spice was planted are failed SoundCloud rappers (I can certainly say I am not among them). I guess only time will tell if Ice Spice is wildly successful, or if she's the result of industry marketing...