Matthew Lee, Ben Swain, and Max Tonkon — juniors at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy (SCH) — have each experienced a glimpse of fame just while walking the hallways of school.

The three friends are the founders of 2MB, an independent record label, and the creative minds behind Midas., the artist name under which they release music. Over the past year, as the trio has put in lots of entrepreneurial effort, they have noticed the rewards begin to materialize. The first album from Midas. dropped in June, bringing a new wave of interest among the SCH community.

One of the best moments was “seeing our music release on Spotify and seeing our peers listen to it,” Lee told the Local. “The other day I heard the field hockey team here playing it, which is kind of random, but cool for me.”

Tonkon, who sings in SCH’s a capella group, the Hilltones, had a similar experience while DJ-ing at a Hilltones party.

“Before we had even dropped our first song, I was deejaying and some kid who I had never met before came up to me and said, ‘I’ve never heard this song. What’s it called?’” Tonkon said. “[I thought] ‘Alright, people actually like the way this sounds. That’s cool.’”

What started as a school project has taken on a life of its own, as 2MB and Midas. continue to grow. Luckily for fans of their music, Lee, Swain, and Tonkon are committed to growing alongside their business.

An ambitious endeavor

At SCH, sophomore students are required to take a Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL) Capstone class in which they design their own product, service, or creative entity. For Lee, Swain, and Tonkon, this curriculum was the launching point for their venture.

The three students had each dabbled in playing music before, but were especially drawn to the production side of the field. They were experimenting with GarageBand, a software that allows users to create music, but ran into an obstacle when it came to releasing their own songs.

“Obviously, since we’re high school kids, we’re not going to be able to get signed to any big record label,” Lee said. “So we wanted to fix that problem by starting our own. [But] we had no clue how to do that.”

Their guidance came in the form of an email from Adam Butz-Weidner, a CEL teacher also known as Mr. BW, who suggested the trio form a record label for their Capstone project in the second semester of sophomore year. Throughout the semester, Butz-Weidner was the students’ “biggest mentor and aide.”

“We wanted to do something adventurous and ambitious," Swain said. "That was the word that Mr. BW used all semester: ambitious.”

Hard work

According to Lee, Swain, and Tonkon, creating a record label from scratch is more difficult than it appears. The students spent countless late nights in SCH’s recording studio, learning the ropes of operating the equipment and making beats and lyrics. Then came the recording sessions, mastering and mixing the music, and getting feedback on how it sounds. Next, the trio learned about distributing, using a service called DistroKid to put their music on various streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. In between all these steps came other details — making an album cover, marketing the release, and writing each song’s credits.

“When people see a song, they don’t realize how many individuals are behind one song,” Lee said. “There are usually so many different roles and so many different people helping to make one song as good as it can be.”

Even something as simple as selecting a name for the company can run into complications. Although the label was first called Hill Entertainment Group, the team realized that name was taken when creating a website. They quickly pivoted to 2MB — two “M” names (Max and Matthew) and one “B” name (Ben).

When producing music, the students collaborated with some of their artist peers at SCH, including Sarah Murphey, Christian DiMarco, Sam Bevan, and Tomás Hanna.

Most of the songs 2MB has released can be categorized as house music — a genre with an upbeat electronic sound.

Awards and achievements

Lee, Swain, and Tonkon’s hard work throughout their Capstone class paid off. At the end of the semester, the students won the Dr. Sands Entrepreneurial Mindset Award, given to the project that “exemplifies all four entrepreneurial pillars: Resiliency, opportunity seeking, resourcefulness, and creativity.”

With the success the trio achieved, they also decided to give back and share their talents with the community. Lee, Swain, and Tonkon volunteered as instructors for Horizons at SCH, a summer enrichment program for young children.

“We set up a week-long course with different lessons for each day teaching the basics of music production to fourth graders,” Lee said.

The kids were taught how to create songs on their iPads and shared their work on the last day of camp.

“It was really fun to see how our words can turn into their actions and their sounds,” Swain said. “It was a great experience and really rewarding.”

The three juniors all have ambitious goals for the future of 2MB, including producing a song for a well-known artist. They list artists such as Calvin Harris, Ellie Goulding, and Martin Garrix as inspirations.

The future is full of possibilities, but for now, Lee, Swain, and Tonkon have work to do.

“I think it’s a big part of who we are — we’re really dead set on making the best music that we can,” Swain said. “As we continue to release music, it’s only going to get better, more refined, and more calculated for what we know our audience wants.”

Maggie Dougherty can be reached at Margaret@chestnuthilllocal.com.