Going viral is not the same as getting played: social media for DJs and producers

Soberboy’s music has travelled a long way through other DJs’ sets, including a summer in which one of his records was played at Hï Ibiza and passed two million views. He is still careful about how much credit he gives to the internet. I asked him to explain the distinction he keeps making.

How useful is social media for an artist today?

It is extremely useful, and there is no point in pretending otherwise. It is the fastest method an unknown artist has ever had for reaching the people who matter. A promoter in another country can discover you in a single afternoon, which was not possible before. Anyone who dismisses it is arguing with reality.

What it does not do is decide whether your record gets played in clubs.

Why not? Surely being popular online helps.

It helps you to be heard. It does not make a track work on a dancefloor. Those are two separate tests. A short clip can perform very well online because it is funny, or because the caption is clever, or because it appeared at the right moment. The full record may then do nothing in a club, because it was never built for a large room and a powerful sound system.

DJs understand this. They can see your numbers, and they will still only play the records that work when they play them. That is an honest filter, and it takes no account of your view count.

What does make a track get picked up by other DJs?

A strong hook, or an idea that a lot of people already agree with. It has to be something people recognise immediately and want to repeat. That is what carries a record beyond your own followers, because listeners pass it on and other artists hear it through them rather than directly from you.

After that, you have to continue. One successful clip is an accident. What builds a career is returning to the same idea until an audience forms around it and people begin to associate that idea with your name.

How does that turn into support from other DJs?

Slowly, and usually indirectly. It reaches the people around them first, meaning their friends, the comments on their posts and the promoters they work with. Once that has happened often enough, a DJ hears your music from a source they trust rather than from a promotional email, and that receives a completely different level of attention.

Sometimes it leads to a collaboration, and that is often the point at which things change. An artist with an established dancefloor audience takes your idea and makes it work in a club, and your idea then travels into rooms it would never have reached on its own.

Is there a risk in following that route?

There is, and it catches people out. Support from a larger artist moves you forward very quickly, and it becomes easy to believe that the momentum belongs to you. It does not. It belongs to the record, or to the person who played it. As soon as their attention moves elsewhere, you are back where you started, except that a larger audience is now watching you.

Collaborations and endorsements open doors. They do not carry you through them.

What has to be in place before that happens?

You have to be able to perform well on your own. That means being genuinely good in a room where nobody else’s name is on the poster, in front of a crowd who came specifically to see you and are waiting to decide whether it was worth it.

Nobody can do that part for you, and no amount of support will rescue a poor set. If people arrive curious and leave unimpressed, all the attention has achieved is to make sure that more people know.

What does it mean to bring yourself to the crowd?

It means playing your own identity rather than the safest version of what you think is expected. If people came because of something specific in your music, then that is what they came for, and giving them a generic peak-time set is a form of false advertising even if the room dances. Trust the quality that brought you attention in the first place, and build the night around it.

It also means preparing properly. Know the venue, know your slot, know what the room needs and know how you want it to feel at the end. Online attention will get you booked once. Your performance is what gets you booked again.

What balance would you recommend?

Use the internet seriously, because the reach is free and ignoring it would be foolish. However, measure yourself by what happens on the dancefloor. Ask whether the record still works at two in the morning, whether the room stayed until the end, and whether anybody came back the following month. Those answers decide whether this becomes a career or remains a moment.