Somewhere just outside Coboconk, Ont., the cracked asphalt of a long, lonely road turns to gravel as it winds through thick brush along the shore of Four Mile Lake.
The big lakeside A-frame cottage that sits at road’s end is as unlikely a spot as any to find a commercial music factory churning out themes and singles for TV networks like History Channel, Bravo, National Geographic and NBC, or artists like Beyoncé and Maroon 5. But there’s very little that’s typical about the music industry these days.
Amid virtual distribution like iTunes, disc-rip sharing and outright Bit-Torrent stealing, revenue models shifted suddenly in recent years, knocking the pins out from under the big record labels and leaving them scrambling to find new ways to survive.
But Jared Gutstadt saw opportunity in the ruins. Four years on, his company, Jingle Punks, employs dozens of songwriters who supply music — anything from themes to backgrounds, interstitial riffs and beats — to as many as 500 television series and specials across the gamut of specialty cable and main networks.
They say that the key to business success is to find a need and fill it. So when Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, complained that the company’s hold music was “garbage”, before the most recent earnings call, New York startup Jingle Punks sprang into action.