Forbes BLK has profiled label founder Ebstar in a feature that traces his journey from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe to Seoul, South Korea, and the trajectory that has taken The ESØTËRIC Ones from a single founding idea to a multi country roster and more than five million streams.
Forbes BLK is the publication’s global community for Black entrepreneurs, professionals and creators. Launched out of the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit in Detroit and grown to more than eight thousand members at time of writing, the platform exists to connect a community whose work has historically been undercovered by mainstream business and culture press. Editorial coverage on the platform tends to favour profiles of founders building outside the standard funding pipelines. That orientation is what makes the Ebstar feature a useful one.
The profile covers the trajectory in compressed form. Ebenezer Tarubinga was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe in November 2001. He moved to South Korea in his late teens and built a parallel career in artificial intelligence research at Korea University, with published work in semantic segmentation. He founded The ESØTËRIC Ones from Seoul in 2023, twenty months ago at the time of writing, with no major label support. The catalogue has so far put a track at the top of the Luxembourg Daily Spotify Chart (“But....I DONT TRUST YOU,” March 2024), with additional Spotify chart appearances in South Korea, signed more than twenty artists across six nations, and is on track to cross five million streams within months. The label founder is twenty three years old.
The piece reads less as a profile and more as a brief argument. The argument is that independent music can look different from the version the industry has trained both artists and audiences to expect. It does not have to be assembled in New York or London. It does not have to wait for major label validation. It does not have to ask for permission before deciding what its catalogue will sound like. It can be run remotely, on royalty splits structured to keep masters in artists’ hands, with a roster the label has not seen the inside of the same studio with.
That argument is not unique to Ebstar. The structural conditions that make it possible, distribution platforms accessible to anyone, royalty payments on a per stream basis, social media as the primary marketing channel, are available to any artist with a laptop and an internet connection. What is rarer is the discipline to use those tools to build a catalogue rather than chase a moment.
The Forbes BLK feature lands at a turning point in the label’s arc. ECHOES OF LOVE I (Deluxe), the album whose “But....I DONT TRUST YOU” topped the Luxembourg Daily and whose “The Breakup Anthem” reached number 45 in South Korea, was five months into release. Maknaebe (Deluxe Version) was two weeks away from release; within days of its arrival it would put a second track at the top of the Luxembourg Daily and post the label’s highest national chart placement to date, a number 9 in Estonia. The five million stream milestone followed two months after the profile. The piece catches the operation mid step, which is also the most useful moment to write about a label like this. The numbers are real but not yet the story. The story is what the working operation is teaching about how independent music can be built in the streaming era.
That is what the piece, in the end, is for. Other artists, founders and label owners who are trying to figure out whether the model is viable can read the Forbes profile and find the answer. The model is viable. The work is the price.