Marketplace All-in-One

Recent controversy surrounding the rock band Geese and a digital marketing firm Chaotic Good Projects has sparked debate over the tactics firms use to drum up hype for artists online. How can we tell if online hype is real or fake? And does it really matter? Trapital founder Dan Runcie joins Kimberly to break it down. Plus, a final thank you from Kimberly.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

"Geese psyop debate: Rock band raises questions about music marketing" from Fast Company
"Fake Fans" from Eliza McLamb
"The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop" from Wired
"If Geese are a psy-op, so is everything else" from Dazed
"Are Chaotic Good’s marketing practices bad for listeners?" From CBC Arts

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Retail sales in April were up 0.5% compared to the month before and are up 4.9% from a year ago, according to the Census Bureau. So are retail sales higher because consumers are resilient and buying more stuff, or are we spending more just because prices are higher and the stuff we want is more expensive? We discuss. Then, in search of cleaner energy, two new power transmission lines are connecting Quebec to New York and Massachusetts.

Kevin Warsh is officially the next chair of the Federal Reserve. The Senate voted to confirm him to a four-year term on Wednesday. He’ll replace Chair Jerome Powell, who led the central bank for the last eight years. He’ll face a challenging economic environment, worsening inflation, and pressure from President Donald Trump to cut rates. Plus, a look at how median actually rents fell in April and why one Arizona coffee roaster is unable to claim tariff refunds.

How far would you go to participate in a boycott? Cancel your concert tickets? Spend 25% more on groceries? What about refusing to visit your family? This week, Reema speaks to Canadians who are going to great lengths to boycott the United States. Plus, a conversation with financial therapist Lindsay Bryan-Podvin about how to practice “good enough” boycotting.

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Voice cloning is the use of artificial intelligence to generate a clone of a real person’s voice, imitating the sound, when they pause and what words they typically emphasize. And it can be hard for people to identify voices as being AI-generated.

Research last year from UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid, an expert in digital forensics, found that people correctly identify a voice as AI-generated only 60% of the time.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Farid about the rapid sophistication of audio deepfakes, why it's so hard to tell the difference between a real voice and an AI-generated one right now, and some tips to help you spot voice clones.