Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

More than a decade ago, Jared Gutstadt sold his audio library company, Jingle Punks, to one of the world’s largest talent acquisition and private equity companies. Jingle Punks emerged as a frontrunner in a legacy industry by leveraging newly available technologies to simplify music sourcing for TV shows.

Now, Gutstadt is at it again, using new technologies to mitigate migraines in the podcast creator economy.

“The podcast business is a lot like the music business. Big podcasters like Joe Rogan, Mel Robbins, Jay Shetty, and others have big teams to tackle the end-to-end marketing and distribution of their shows. However, the other 99% of creators are doing it by themselves,” Gutstadt said. His startup, based in Nashville, is called Rebel Audio, and it offers all the tools a podcaster needs to get their show into listeners’ ears.

For example, from the Rebel Audio interface, a creator can generate transcripts and translations, publish to Apple, Spotify, SiriusXM, Amazon, and iHeart, plus deploy AI to clip ‘viral moments’ for social media content.

“I know I’m not the first person to create a podcast platform, but I’m making it more dynamic with the use of technology and AI,” he said.

Rebel Audio: inception and vision

Gutstadt first had the vision for the company in the spring of 2025, after his own frustrations with podcast publishing. Although it had been years since the self-proclaimed “cowboy” had his last rodeo, it didn’t deter him from immersing himself in new tools. Playing around with platforms like Loveable, Suno, and others, he started to better understand LLMs, how chat interfaces work, and how to build upon these capabilities to make a standalone platform.

“My strength is being able to understand the unique pain points of creatives. That’s why my former company, Jingle Punks, was all about,” he said. “Now, I’m doing the same thing with Rebel Audio just in a different era.”

Gutstadt said his real passion is in democratizing the creator economy, to level the playing field, whether you have 1 million listeners or 1,000.

That’s what Rebel Audio is all about.

Drawing on past experiences

Since Gutstadt was young, he has always been a creative technologist. He was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, but moved to New York during the Web 1.0 boom to chase his dreams of a career in interactive media. He enrolled in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), which he said was one of the first graduate programs that taught students HTML, content creation, and digital competency.

“Two things occurred: One, I got swept up in the early 2000s indie rock scene and was playing in really cool bands. And two, since we had no budget, I had to learn how to DIY a lot of our video content, mixing music and marketing materials,” Gutstadt explained. “By daytime, I was an editor, and by nighttime, I was a rockstar.”

That double life laid the groundwork for his first entrepreneurial endeavor in 2008, Jingle Punks.

“When Reality TV first became a thing, it needed an abundance of what I called musical wallpaper. So by creating Jingle Punks, musicians could submit their music, and television producers would get unlimited access to the musical buffet,” he said.

An industry giant caught wind of the platform’s success and initiated an acquisition in 2013. William Morris Endeavor was (and still is) one of the largest talent acquisition companies in the world. They were purchased and made private by the private equity firm, Silver Lake, last year, now going by the name WME Group.

A history of wins along the way

Towards the end of Gutstadt’s run with Jingle Punks, he pivoted to work on some additional vanity projects for ad agencies. He said some of WME Group’s clients included the Professional Bull Riders (PBR) and the UFC. They could have used Jingle Punks’ library for background music; however, given Gutstadt’s background, he decided to create supersized jingles for those sports’ theme music.

“I became known as Jingle Jared,” he laughed.

He also became a two-time Sports Emmy nominee and a three-time Cannes Lions winner for that work.

Why Tennessee?

With connections across the country in the music and television industry, some readers may be wondering why “Jingle Jared” chose Middle Tennessee.

Well, for starters, the Canadian-born entrepreneur is frequently photographed and spotted with his cowboy hat. So, there’s a cultural draw, but Gutstadt said it’s broader than that.

“I walked into the Entrepreneur Center and met people from Launch Tennessee. It struck me that I really wanted this business to be founded and created in a place where there are everyday creators – and that’s always what Nashville’s community had been for me,” he said.

He said that since making the decision, the network he’s built through LaunchTN has been invaluable, helping him raise an oversubscribed $3 million seed round with backing from angel investors and venture capital (VC) firms, including Knoxville-based Market Square Ventures (MSV).

Right now, Rebel Audio is in a public beta stage with about 1,000 early users, but Gutstadt hopes to make the platform fully public by the fall of this year. The platform is Gutstadt’s bet that the next great show won’t come from the creators with the biggest teams, but from the 99% doing it alone.

Check out Rebel Audio.

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