Sombr's rise to fame: Automating Attention in the Age of AI
Zuhair LakhaniCo-founder3 min read
So you probably know Sombr as the guy who makes overly yearning situationship music.
I know him as one of the many artists that mastered the art of propaganda.
The truth is, just like your situationship, he lied to you to become famous.
He's been all over your feed for the last two years, seemingly out of nowhere?
At doublespeed, we see many artists/record labels asking to run the same strategies but Sombr was one of the first to master it.
Sombr’s story starts on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where Shane Michael Boose grew up skating through Chinatown and taking the subway to school.
At home, his father had played in bands, instruments were always around. Sombr also spent time in New York’s musical-theatre scene in his early teens.
Around eleven, he started making music on GarageBand on his phone. He moved to the computer version, then to Logic Pro, initially making rap beats. In an interview with Firebird, he described spending hours in his room teaching himself production, with the COVID lockdown giving him time to improve.
He also saved money from scooping ice cream to buy recording equipment, but this child had a growing professional ambition.
If you go on Sombr’s Instagram, you see the polished photos. The performances. The videos where he looks like a serious artist.
Then you see the fan pages. And suddenly, you are seeing a completely different side of him:
- Backstage clips
- Random conversations
- Little moments that show his personality
- Jokes you would never put in a press release
But how do you get all these pages posting about you before you’re even famous?
Now, THEY claim this content comes from people following him around.
Do you REALLY think the same set of fans are following him to every shoot, every show, for every random thing he does?
Marketing managers pay people to run these accounts and the marketing managers provide these pages with the inside scoop themselves.
Warner’s Will Morrow named Sombr as a successful burner-page campaign.
Whats a burner page campaign you ask?
Call it what you want: “flooding,” “seeding,” “volume posting,” “trend simulation,” “burner pages,” - essentially posting at scale to create synthetic hype.
As a smaller niche artist, it used to be impossible to compete with the likes of Bruno Marss, Drake, Taylor Swift (my favorite) when they're spending millions on campaigns.
Not to mention the social proof that comes along with having so many fans.
AI and socials is the equalizer.
Most celebrities and artists you know use something that looks like this:
100s of accounts posting daily. Today, you have one agent finding the footage. Another agent figuring out what’s interesting about it. Another writing the scripts.
Then you have an army of AI micro influencers talking about you, around the clock.
One is talking about you in a podcast. Another’s doing a street interview about the you. Another’s giving rating S-tier platinum status on a tier list.
It never sleeps, never stop, and keeps scaling - all of this can be automated.
Just to be clear, I really love Sombr and he did a lot of this before it was made easier with AI.
In 2026, every artist is using this strategy at some level of their GTM stack. You could probably fake your way into becoming a celebrity in a couple months with a few hundred accounts.
I know this, because that's what we do at doublespeed. For artists, brands, apps, etc.
We run fully autonomous agent loops that generate content, A/B test hooks and scripts, and post across carefully crafted TikTok, Instagram accounts.
Anyone can have a managed a fleet of micro-influencers that are completely autonomous.
