Soberboy’s music has travelled a long way through other people’s sets — including a summer where a record of his was played at Hï Ibiza and reached a couple of million views. He is still careful about how much credit he gives the internet. I asked him to explain the distinction he keeps drawing.
How powerful is social media for an artist right now?
Enormously powerful, and there is no point pretending otherwise. It is the fastest way an unknown name has ever been able to reach the people who matter. A promoter in another country can find you in an afternoon. That did not exist before, and anyone dismissing it is arguing with reality.
What it does not do is decide whether your record gets played.
Why not? Surely trending helps.
It helps you get heard. It does not make a track work on a dancefloor. Those are separate tests. A clip can do very well online because it is funny, or because the caption is clever, or because it landed at the right moment — and then the full record does nothing in a club, because it was never built for a room and a big sound system.
DJs know this. They can see the numbers, and they still only play what works when they drop it. That is the honest filter, and it does not care about your views.
So what actually gets a track picked up?
A hook, or an idea that a lot of people already agree with. Something people recognise instantly and want to repeat. That is what carries a record beyond your own audience, because listeners pass it on and other artists hear it through them rather than through you.
Then you keep going. One clip is an accident. The thing that builds is returning to the same idea until an audience forms around it and people start associating that territory with your name.
How does that turn into support from other DJs?
Slowly, and usually sideways. It reaches the people around them first — their friends, their comments, the promoters they work with. Once enough of that has happened, a DJ hears it from a direction they trust rather than from a promo email, and that is a completely different level of attention.
Sometimes it turns into a collaboration, and that is often the moment things change. Somebody with dancefloor reach takes your idea and makes it work in a club context. Your idea travels into rooms it would never have reached on its own.
Is there a downside to taking that route?
There is a trap in it, yes. Support from bigger artists moves you very quickly, and it is easy to start believing that momentum belongs to you. It does not. It belongs to the record, or to the person who played it. The moment their attention moves on, you are exactly where you were, only with a larger audience watching.
Collaborations and co-signs open doors. They do not carry you through them.
So what has to be in place before that happens?
You have to be able to deliver on your own. That means being genuinely good in a room with nobody else’s name on the poster, in front of a crowd who came specifically for you and are waiting to find out whether it was worth it.
Nobody can do that part for you. No amount of support fixes a bad set. If people arrive curious and leave unimpressed, all the attention has done is make sure more people know.
What does “bringing yourself to the crowd” mean in practice?
Playing your own identity instead of the safest version of what is expected. If people came because of something specific in your music, they came for that, and giving them a generic peak-time set is a bait and switch even if the room dances. Trust the thing that got you noticed and build a night around it.
It also means preparation. Know the venue, know the slot, know what the room needs and what you want it to feel like at the end. Attention gets you the booking once. The set gets you the second one.
What is the balance you would recommend?
Use the internet properly — it is free reach and you would be foolish to ignore it. But measure yourself on the floor. Ask whether the record works at two in the morning, whether the room stayed, whether anyone came back the following month. Those answers decide whether this is a career or a moment.
