Meet one of the creators behind YouTube’s 2024 Coachella content

Since 2011, YouTube has been one of Coachella‘s biggest hype guys. Every time the annual desert festival rolls around, YouTube–as Coachella’s exclusive streaming partner through at least 2026–fills its social channels with livestreams of headliner acts, behind-the-scenes interviews with artists, and peeks at what attending content creators are up to.

This year, much of that content was made by one man and his team.

Hunter Ellenbarger was Creative Lead for YouTube’s Instagram account from 2018 to 2022, and in that time grew the account to more than 15 million followers. When he left YouTube in 2022, it was to launch his own creative studio and consultancy, Star Quality–and in April, he and Star Quality’s team of designers, producers, and editors were responsible for 100+ pieces of YouTube x Coachella promotional content.

“I got to come up with the concept and direct the talent,” Ellenbarger tells Tubefilter. “I worked with a lot of these people directly before I left, so they trust me inherently. My old role was making sure social content was up to brand standards, so I’m super fluent in that. I had a lot of trust.”

That trust paid off in eyeballs: Ellenbarger’s content, including videos with music artists Bebe Rexha, Victoria Monét, FLO, LE SSERAFIM, and J Balvin, and with creators like Mai Pham and BENOFTHEWEEK, helped drive over 5.5 million views by the festival’s end. (There was also a cool moment where Star Quality commissioned Brazillian sculptor/YouTube creator João Doce to sculpt Tyler, the Creator wearing airbrushed Coachella merch, and then gifted that sculpture to Tyler backstage at the festival.)

Putting out that much content in such a short timeframe–Coachella ran April 12-14 and 19-21–required a lot of effort and organization from the Star Quality team, Ellenbarger says. He brought four producers and designers to the festival with him, and had three editors working remotely while cameras were rolling.

The team produced graphics “in relative real time that were inspired by what we shot so that they could come together really quickly,” he says. Full-fledged onsite video content was turned around in 48 hours. And Star Quality was working round-the-clock on livestreams and things like tune-in guides and meme posts, too.

“It was crazy,” he says. “It’s such a crazy experience, beause you get there and then you shoot for like eight hours and then you get to go to the concerts at night. We kept joking that it was like breaking news every night because there’s so many special guests and new songs and just crazy cultural things happening all around you. It’s long, long days, but I’m super proud of the work that came out of it. It felt really fulfilling to get to make so much fun stuff.”

Coachella may be over, but Ellenbarger’s got a full schedule of more “fun stuff” to make. So far this year, Star Quality has snagged social media strategy consulting gigs with Patreon and Sony Pictures Classic, and worked on rebranding for Good Children, a podcast from Joe Hegyes and Andrew Muscarella that has more than 20,000 subscribers on YouTube and recently landed Trixie Mattel as a guest.

“I think it’s been really cool to see the company expand,” Ellenbarger says. “My dream for 2024 was to go beyond YouTube.”