Jared Gutstadt
“We’re making a movie for your ears.”
Jared Gutstadt established enough entrepreneurial chops for a lifetime when he founded the highly successful Jingle Punks, a company that provides original music for ads, TV, film and video games, back in ; at that time, he developed the whimsical persona “Jingle Jared.” He sold the firm in , and then bided his time for five years before coming back as the CEO-founder of Audio Up, a production team that focuses largely on narrative audio podcasts built around original song scores, instead of licensing existing music. • How has the first year of Audio Up worked out, since its start roughly coincided with the beginning of the pandemic? It looks much different, but the upside is far greater than anything I was able to accomplish in
years at Jingle Punks. No one had really thought about how music and publishing played into the podcasting world. Last spring, we had raised most of our seed capital to get going, and then, unfortunately, COVID hit — at which point every star I could ever imagine working with became suddenly available, with my first projects being with people like Miranda Lambert, 24kGoldn, Machine Gun Kelly and Iann Dior. It was an unfortunate time for many in the business, but it really kickstarted our business. Instead of making three or four of these audio musicals in a leisurely clip during our first year, we ended up putting about a dozen into production.
• Podcast narratives remove an element from the storytelling — the visual — most people spent their quarantine consuming. Isn’t that counterintuitive? I thought three years ago that audio media would be the next major media shift— meaning anything that fits into Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible. I find myself having to explain it less every day, but the first few times I met with celebrities about making a podcast, they were like, “Yeah, but I don’t want to do a talk show.” I said, “That’s not what we do. We’re making a movie for your ears.” I think that we’re seeing the very beginning of an old-new medium, which is radio for the internet. Audio, on its surface, is less sexy, and if people think of it as audiobooks, that’s really not sexy. But as people joke about “I’ve watched everything on Netflix,” I think during COVID we reached a peak screen-burnout moment. There’s a higher level of engagement with audio.
• Give us an example of a current priority project. “Ingleside Inn” is a midcentury romp in Palm Springs starring Jason Alexander — it’s like “Love Boat” in the desert. We decided to lean into Latin culture and Afropop-type of stuff that would lend itself well to a soundtrack if this becomes, say, a Broadway play. We’re writing music, then talking to different mainstream Latin artists saying, “What do you think of the song?” Lance Bass [who also co-stars, along with Michael Mckean and Richard Kind] had it in development as a TV series for years. Then we met at a cocktail party and he pitched me. We optioned the book, restarted the scripting process, wrote all-new music and cast it in six to eight months, as opposed to a five-year process for TV.
• Do you ever miss being “Jingle Jared”? I had this ready-made, fun, clownish thing I’d done during years of being everybody’s favorite dinner guest that ended when I had to actually come back, reinvented possibly, as an adult. If people still call me Jingle Jared, I look at that as a badge of honor. But I purposely went with a new trade that didn’t have the letter “J” in it.