Just before 2025 came to a close, Doechii dropped a new song called “Girl, Get Up.” What got the most attention wasn’t the feature from SZA, or the synthy sample of Birdman and Clipse’s 2002 hit “What Happened to That Boy.” It was Doechii’s lyrics, where she delivered a very pointed in/out list for the new year. In: drinking kombucha, getting good sleep, and meditating. Out: misogynistic assholes on the internet.
If you’re a woman in the music industry, the “out” is familiar territory. Doechii has been battling these guys since 2024, ever since she broke through with her excellent full-length debut, Alligator Bites Never Heal, winning a Grammy for Best Rap Album (and, as she brags on “Girl, Get Up,” a co-sign from Kendrick Lamar). Despite making music for over a decade now, finding mainstream success resulted in the internet accusing the Florida rapper of being an “industry plant,” specifically controversial streamer Adin Ross, who called her out on his Kick channel. Doechiii fires back at these claims on the track: “All that industry plant shit wack/I see it on the blogs, I see you in the chats,” she says, adding, “Y’all can’t fathom that I work this hard/And y’all can’t fathom that I earned this chart.”
So what exactly is an “industry plant”? It’s a term lobbed at artists in an attempt to discredit them, to question their authenticity and to suggest their rise to fame couldn’t have happened organically — that there were marketing ploys and executives pulling the strings, manufacturing their artistry behind closed doors, or maybe their parents just have connections in the music industry. And though some male musicians, like the British rocker Yungblud or the R&B singer 4batz, have faced industry plant accusations, anyone paying attention can see that this term is mostly directed at female musicians.
“It’s such an insane fucking double standard,” Phoebe Bridgers said in 2020. “If you have wealthy parents, you’re not allowed to make music as a woman, but you’re rewarded for it as a man. Every white boy who is mediocre is an industry plant by that standard.” Or, as Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale told Rolling Stone in 2022: “When it comes down to it, it’s just misogyny, isn’t it? If people are gonna troll us, then I’m definitely gonna troll them back.”
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The term “industry plant” first surfaced on hip-hop forums in the early 2010s, but over time it’s spread through genres like indie rock and pop. Lana Del Rey was one notable victim of this narrative, primarily after it came out that she’d dated a label head for several years. He never signed her, but Del Rey playfully leaned into the controversy anyway, releasing “Fucked My Way Up to the Top” on 2014’s Ultraviolence.
The phrase became so popular, so casually thrown at female musicians, that it’s become commonplace to ask them how they feel about it in interviews. In 2022, I asked King Princess, real name Mikaela Straus, about the internet discovering that Ida and Isidor Straus, the Macy’s co-owners who famously died on the Titanic, were her great-great-grandparents. (Technically this wasn’t an “industry plant” accusation, but a similarly dubious “nepo baby” one.) She pointed out that she didn’t actually grow up swimming in Scrooge McDuck-style wealth. “Fundamentally, people are frustrated by the socioeconomic state of the music industry,” she said. “So I totally get where it comes from. I’m just not that girl. I’m not going to front like I was some rich kid. There were tough moments, and there still are.”
Claire Cottrill, who performs as Clairo, was criticized for not being the self-made bedroom-pop phenom that fans imagined her to be, because they found out that her father was friendly with the founder of her label at the time, Fader’s Jon Cohen. Some people seemed angry about the fact that this wasn’t disclosed in interviews, though Cottrill has never denied it, and if anything, her honesty about it only adds to her authenticity.
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“I definitely am not blind to the fact that things have been easier for me than other people’s experiences,” she told me in her 2021 RS cover story. “It would be stupid of me to not acknowledge the privilege I had from the start to be able to sign somewhere where there’s trust, to be able to sign a record deal that doesn’t revolve around keeping myself afloat financially…but I would be stupid to not use that relationship in a moment where I was really scared and really confused. People just think what they want to think and I can’t stop that, but I am getting better at explaining it for what it is.”
Even superstars like Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan have been met with skepticism. “They’re nobodies!” Eilish joked of her working-actor parents. “Where’s the plant? Where’s the seed, bro? Where’d you put it? I’d love to be an industry plant. I would love to have not worked hard for this.”
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Roan, whose career skyrocketed in 2024, a good 10 years after she began making music, had an equally funny response. “Just because you don’t know someone doesn’t mean that they’re an industry plant,” she said in her RS cover story. “Did you ever consider maybe you’re just out of the loop?”
Perhaps this is something we should all consider this year. So we’ll repeat Doechii’s lessons, with a slight tweak thanks to Chappell. In: kombucha, getting good sleep — and admitting when you’re just out of the loop. Out: baseless allegations against musicians.
