We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sterling Stetar. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sterling below.

Sterling, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s jump right into the heart of things. Outsiders often think businesses or industries have much larger profit margins than they actually do – the reason is that outsiders are often unaware of the biggest challenges to profitability in various industries – what’s the biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

In my industry prices can get super high, you’ll notice producers, mix engineers, videographers and photographers charge high rates for any service. This in itself is a challenge, as most don’t have large budgets. In the rock industry that I work in, budget holds back most the projects im on. But the quality of the content that they ask for, requires over $20,000 in gear. So the challenge is, keep the cost low, production value high, and get it all done in a reasonable amount of time. This goes between, video or audio production. So most of the time the cost of the project ends up going to rentals or paying off gear you had to buy to get the project started

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I got started playing music super young. I’d guess around 8. Since then I put tons of hours behind several instruments like drums guitar and bass. Overtime I played in bands and met friends who would eventually welcome me in to my local music scene. Soon after I moved to Nashville and polished my craft in music production and mixing. Less than a year later I moved back to Austin. From there I had little to no income in production so I was struggling to find a way to get my name out there. I found that creating content for social medias would be my route And bought a camera. That lead me to going to friends concerts with a camera for fun a grabbing shots of my friends bands. Eventually people asked me to come to their shows and thankfully paid me as at the time because , I had just lost my job. Over the next 3 years until today I’ve been recording more bands and shooting more music videos and photos.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

One of the pivots I made was going from Audio only to generalized media.

I recognized that there are so many bedroom producers that graduated random schools it’s just not worth it to compete because bands will usually record themselves at the cost of their sound and usually they won’t recognize it till years down the line where they hear it after they get better.

When I got my camera I knew it would be a good move because it’s gonna be really hard for a drummer to get motion video with multiple angles themself during a set.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

It absolutely started as a side hustle not even really trying to do it for other people originally. I just wanted my media to be cool. But people started asking for help. A few of the coolest milestones I’ve had were obviously working with some of my favorite bands growing up (ex: impending doom, the browning, fit for an autopsy)

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @sterlingstetar