Help save a Black music studio in Brooklyn

My name is Ember, alongside my partners and lifelong friends Sinora and Justin, we run one of the hottest studios in Brooklyn, New York called The Stadium BK. In the music industry, women of color are often an afterthought, especially as audio engineers. Not many women own music studios, let alone queer Black women. Sinora (who has engineered for artists including; Pop Smoke, Fivio Foreign, Fat Joe, BROCKHAMPTON and Bobby Shmurda to name a few) and I are young and upcoming trailblazers in our field both creatively and professionally. Justin is a music producer who is quick, efficient, and a patient teacher dedicating his time to helping others to develop and hone their skills in production and engineering. In June of 2022, we were given the opportunity to run an entire studio fully equipped alongside a silent partner. We quickly became the face of the business, ran the day-to-day, booked new clients, and paid monthly rent. Together, we began to take strides, organizing and providing internships to expand and teach the youth how to engineer music professionally. A week into February, due to our differences within the business, we are parting ways with our silent partner. In order to maintain business operations, we are reaching out to our community to help us raise 8,000 dollars by February 28th. These funds will support the overhead costs including all the equipment included with the studio to continue to record our clients (mics, pre-amp, interfaces, computers, speaker monitors, screen monitors, midi keyboards, and furniture), the studio’s social media accounts and the rest of the intellectual property of The Stadium BK.

This setback has caused us immense stress and pressure under our current conditions. As a new business, we do not currently have the financial standings to make this amount of money on our own in such a short time frame, let alone the shortest month of the year. If we don’t raise enough money we risk losing everything by March, setting us back to square one. All of our investments and hard work in making the studio a place to create with no bounds will be in jeopardy. At Stadium, we help the people from our communities express themselves, vent, breathe, and have a safe environment to create rather than falling victim to the streets. None of us had spaces like this growing up and often recorded ourselves in small closets. When Sinora and I moved to New York from South Florida, we were homeless and lived couch to couch sometimes sleeping on the futon of the band spaces we rented to record our first clients. We used to duct tape our mics to keep them from falling apart. So we made it our mission to create a place where we can better assist the dreams of artists like us to come true. Help us save Stadium, a pillar in the New York Hip-Hop community. We are just getting started and would hate to see it go.

Your support means the world to us,

Ember (Esther), Sinora, Justin, and the rest of The Stadium BK Team