We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ben Sorby a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ben , appreciate you joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

It all started at Ohio Media School Cleveland. The most important part of this story, is that me and brodie could have NEVER met, and i’ll get into that right now.

I started class on August 27, coincidentally Brodie also started class on August 27. But until Mid-October, we had never spoken to each other nor had we met. I was in night classes attending from 6pm-10pm, and brodie was in the day classes 9:30am-1:30pm, so our paths never crossed. Shortly after October, I felt like the night classes weren’t really my thing so I decided to make the switch to day classes. For a while, brodie and i still didn’t interact much, until our october class project.
With this being a media related college, we had to do real-life esque projects “Build a brand and market it” was the scope of this project. Brodie and I shared mutual friends and decided it would be a good idea to come together with them and work on the project.
From this day on, Brodie and I became closer.

Unfortunately, our class project became slightly more realistic than was presumed, and me and brodie had all of our time/ideas/money/and effort taken away as soon as the “project” became a “business”

We both did not agree with how things went down, and wanted more for ourselves. So we decided to pursue our passion together, and start working on the foundation of Freshwater in November of 2024. From there, we started going to local music shows, reaching out to local musicians and bands, and planning out future steps for how to proceed.

Now, we are fully in swing working with over 50+ musicians/bands/music industry professionals and bringing a new wave of media to our Great Lakes Local Talent.

Ben , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Our main goal, is to build a collaborative and ever extensive culture of the Great Lakes Region.

We provide many things like:
live concert coverage and in show content, extensive and elaborate interviews with our interviewer Alex Lindsay, a podcast where we go more into depth about the personal lives behind the music and the stories that come with.
We also offer sponsorships in our content, promotions for other businesses, and branded content to spotlight other people and their work.

“The stories are everywhere, but the person/people themselves can only be in one place at one time” – this is a quote we use often to describe our initiative.
We would say that we are most proud of the happiness of the people we work with, whenever we land a project with someone in the scene, we do the best to make them comfortable and confident as well as being on top of business.
We’ve gotten many words of affirmation from a bunch of music industry professionals and hearing that from them, when it’s our entire mission to bring them as much joy as possible, really makes it feel like we are doing something worth it.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I think that we built our reputation off of the ground, as soon as Freshwater started we were going out to shows, venues, businesses, etc and just trying to get ourselves involved with the area.
Mikey Silas of Coda – Tremont, was immensely helpful. He allowed us our first foot into the scene.
After that, we worked with many artists for free just to build that idea that we want bring spotlight to everyone around us, and the spotlight isn’t supposed to be on us. We do a lot of work from our own accord, and being creative and engaging with people in the area allows them to see what we are doing and the work we are putting into it.
Secondly, being young and having that urge to pursue really helped us as well. Being young isn’t a crutch anymore like people used to say it is, it’s now a superpower. If you’re young and passionate, people will start to realize that your age isn’t the limiting factor of your work.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Word of mouth is honestly the best working thing for us. Working with people in the scene, and bringing them quality work and being passionate about what we do really sends a spark into our clients.

Not just word of mouth works though, we also pursue musicians by going to local shows and introducing ourselves, the business, and our plan for the scene and most often the people we talk to really appreciate what we’re doing and how we’re doing it for them.
Same thing with social media, we contact businesses/bands/creators most often through social media. Send a message, explain our thoughts, and sometimes it’s a yes and sometimes we’re left on delivered. (it happens!) don’t lose hope if you get denied/no answer, try again!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshwaterfrequency?igsh=eG8xNnAwd3Z0dHd4&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: @freshwaterfrequency
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@freshwaterfrequency?si=PWNXYo8OiiTOZIkQ

Image Credits

AlltheHipe + AstralHousefly, Girl Cologne + Ohio Media School (2nd), Drew Walton, BabyLotus