“At the end of the day, you have to sell tickets and stream well”: Sombr on artists who “don’t think about the numbers”Indie singer-songwriter Sombr has opened up on the juggle of reaching for streams and ticket sales, while also caring for art itself.
The 20-year-old musician currently has over 58 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone, and his hit singles Back To Friends and Undressed have also received millions of streams due to them going viral on TikTok.

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With such a huge presence in the world of streaming, Sombr has shared his thoughts on the pressure of achieving successful streaming numbers off the back of his successes so far, while still caring about the music first and foremost.
Speaking to MusicWeek, he explains, “Undressed was the first song I wrote this year. It was just after I’d dropped Back To Friends, which was my most successful song at that point. It was having a lot of success on streaming, and I was feeling really confident because of that, so I just thought, ‘OK, let me make another one,’” he says.
“I feel like so many artists say, ‘Oh, I just make music to make music, I don’t think about the numbers,’ but at the end of the day, if you’re putting yourself out there, doing it as a job and you have an audience, you have to sell tickets and stream well. It’s hard not to feel a sense of pressure at least in the back of your mind – it’s human!”
Despite this, Sombr’s main focus remains his actual music, and says that numbers are not the first thing he thinks of: “I never expected to make a career out of [music]. And with Undressed, we were all just shocked and super excited; it was like, ‘Wow, this is really good shit here.’ We all knew it was special, especially because it had already received such a great response online before we even finished it.”

Another artist who’s spoken about the competition among modern artists is producer Stimming. During an episode of MusicTech’s My Forever Studio podcast, he shared how some artists focus more on showing off rather than focusing on the purpose or passion of making music.
“Being a musician is sometimes more like being a top athlete. [For some artists] it’s not even about the music any more, to be honest,” he said. He went on to add that competitive musicians can often feel like “musician police” rather than supportive peers, and that they tend to release music just to show off their skills, releasing cuts that “nobody wants to listen to” bar “the other 5,000 people on Earth that can also play very good and are astonished by how fast you can play.”
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