As paid promotion on X increasingly blends into everyday posting, it becomes harder to separate genuine fan hype from hidden promotional activity.
Max is a 19-year-old student from London who spends a lot of time on X (previously Twitter); he is an active user in the ‘Music Twitter’ community on X, where he engages in online fan discourse and shares commentary on artists with his 5,000 followers.
Until recently, his account was simply a personal outlet for his unfiltered takes and social life: “I got a message from an A&R guy a couple of months ago,” Max* told me. He was offered some cash in exchange for a promotional tweet. “I know a few people who had done this before, so I somewhat knew what to expect.”
After accepting the offer, Max started receiving many more similar messages, saying he usually does one per week. The requests usually involve him reposting a video of an artist performing or tweeting promoting their work, alongside a supportive comment.
“I tend to just go for the safest thing possible that they would accept, so I guess I naturally don’t have a ton of control,” he explained. Once the tweet has been approved and posted, he is paid around £15 per post. It’s as simple as that, with no contracts or formal agreements exchanged.
Max describes himself as just one of many fan accounts participating in a black market of hidden paid hype on X.
Smaller accounts like his function less as outliers than as entry points into a wider, unregulated promotional ecosystem that operates in the interactions between fan accounts and high-reach music news accounts.
X appears to play a significant role in music promotion, both organic and paid. With tweets capable of reaching millions of users in a matter of hours, it’s no wonder that marketing and PR teams have tapped into X as a promotional tool, drawn by its viral potential and its reputation for authenticity.
However, while fans and people in the industry know that paid promotion takes place on the platform, it is rarely discussed or explicitly labelled in practice, remaining largely hidden in plain sight.
High-profile celebrity news accounts like Pop Crave and Pop Tingz regularly post clips of artists performing and promoting new releases to audiences of more than two million followers.
Within fan communities, it is commonly believed that some of these posts are paid for, despite not being labelled as advertisements. Promotional rates are often reported online to cost hundreds of dollars per post, though exact figures are difficult to verify.
Julie Ragbeer is one of the few artists who has been open about paying for this kind of exposure, telling Yahoo News that a single paid tweet from Pop Tingz helped grow her fanbase from around 20 followers to more than 20,000.
Pop Tingz told the reporter that the post was paid, and confirmed that they usually charge between $100 and $500 (£72 – £363).
In another case, a similar account, Pop Base, was criticised for posting what appeared to be a breaking news headline about confirmed extraterrestrial activity, which was later revealed to be promoting a release for musician Melanie Martinez.
The post introduced an additional layer of concerns around undisclosed promotion on X, as it momentarily functioned as both advertising and misinformation for anyone who did not recognise the post’s true nature. Pop Base did not respond to our request for comment.
Paid promotion does not stop at large, team-run accounts. According to Max, labels increasingly reach out to smaller fan accounts that appear disconnected from the more formal marketing structures.
Max doesn’t disclose that any of the promotional posts he shares have been paid for. He assumes that people can identify these tweets thanks to their formulaic nature and that the lack of disclosure is simply an accepted part of paid posts on the platform. “I haven’t disclosed any paid posts because no one else does and I don’t way to be the person to bring it up.”
Paid posts on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram are closely regulated, with creators expected to clearly label sponsored content. High-profile backlash has followed failures to do so, most notably in 2014, when YouTubers Dan and Phil were heavily criticised for not disclosing a paid collaboration with Oreo.
While X’s Paid Partnerships Policy states that paid promotion “must include clear and conspicuous language” such as “Ad” or “Promoted Content”, enforcement appears inconsistent.
A 2025 study found that more than 95% of sponsored influencer posts on X were not disclosed, despite most users being unable to identify paid content without explicit labelling.
Notably, unlike the majority of Pop Tingz‘s posts on X, its paid promotional tweet for Julie Ragbeer was not cross-posted to the account’s Instagram feed.
On X, the threshold for transparency appears unusually relaxed, allowing paid promotion to circulate openly without ever being explicitly labelled. X was contacted for comment on enforcement of this policy but did not respond.
Not only does undisclosed sponsorship go against the platform guidelines, but it also goes against industry rules on advertising and consumer protection laws in the UK, which could result in a substantial fine.
When I asked Max about this, he admitted that he was largely aware of the legal implications. “I don’t have a job at the moment, so I’m mainly doing it to afford food, but I also don’t want to break the law.”
Max describes himself as being “somewhere in the middle” between being a fan sharing music and part of a marketing ecosystem. “I tend to get artists I listen to and tweet about anyways,” he explained.
“It’s not pure fan promotion because there’s money involved, but a lot of the time I am a fan of the artist I’m promoting and would tweet similar things for free.” He admitted that while he didn’t feel any responsibility to explicitly disclose paid tweets, he sometimes feels bad for praising something he has no interest in.
As paid promotion increasingly populates feeds of everyday posting, the distinction between genuine fan enthusiasm and sponsored content becomes harder to discern.
In total, Max estimates he has made around £300 this way, small sums that have helped cover student expenses such as food or CDs. The stakes may feel low for individuals like him, but the practice raises broader questions about authenticity on a platform built around casual posting and perceived sincerity.
* Name changed at the request of the interviewee
Featured image by Andrew Guan via Unsplash.