The Rattle is announcing its first Los Angeles-based Venture Label artist-led startups with original creations changing the way people think and behave around music and culture. Those being  backed with funding and a dedicated venture building team include Animas, a virtual reality based local tour guide for small cities and places led by artist Alexandria Rowan , and FINKEL, an Anthony Bourdain-style music and culture concept by musicians Brian and Jane Spencer.

Expanding on the first round of UK-based Venture Label companies, The Rattle has chosen to grow its vision of disrupting how artists and technologists create by partnering with a select group of LA Rattle members. The idea behind the partnerships is to prove music culture can be  a universal language capable of breaking barriers. "In our opinion, music in particular is one of the most effective forms of communication across borders,” said Chris Howard, CEO of The Rattle. “So it's important to us that we prove music culture can create positive change across the globe no matter where it was made. Bringing The Rattle to the heart of Western music culture--LA--was a bit of a no-brainer."

The LA environment supports unique types of artists and collaborations, thanks to the culture of the city’s diverse creative communities. It’s the city that people flock to become famous, making it fertile ground for eager innovators looking to break rules and hack new ways into industries from film to gaming.The Rattle LA is tailored to support AV creators, for example, and its varied studio spaces are highly configurable for any artist’s or hacker’s needs. “LA champions creative curiosity, be that through disruptive new mediums in film and television, or technological platforms themselves,” said Dr. Kate Stone, artist-hacker mentor with The Rattle. “The Rattle builds on that spirit, providing a safe space for creators to experiment.  Members are surrounded by other people who are willing to take a risk; it encourages creative vulnerability without the fear of failure.”

Additionally, like any other disruptive founder, artist-founders need risk capital in order to make these industry-disrupting changes, and The Rattle recognized LA as largely lacking that type of funding community. “Let's face it. Both Animas and FINKEL would miss out on the more normal types of risk capital found in the Valley," said Howard. "They don't speak the language of tech startups. So ex-Google types or the likes of Venture Capital investors struggle to understand the opportunity in front of them. But, on the flip side, neither of them look and behave like signable artists either, meaning traditional LA gatekeepers would likely take a pass. To us, they represent a new breed of artist-led disruptor that is going to take over the world. Artists that combine their art with disruptive startup principles. We believe that movement starts in Los Angeles. And that's precisely why we came here. LA has its own kind of rebellious nature. In LA, it’s about being seen, about this incredible optimism and energy. It’s about saying, ‘Let’s just do it.’”
 
Investors have backed The Rattle’s prototype Venture Label with $1.5m. They expect The Rattle team to be brave and do things labels, traditional venture capital or accelerators simply wouldn't do. They pick talented artists and hackers from within their LA based membership. Each artist-founder on the Venture Label is provided a dedicated team--many of whom come from non-traditional backgrounds like technology hackers, community managers, web developers, and startup makers--to help develop a disruptive artist-led company. These founders also receive a stipend for a year, allowing them to focus on their project full-time with the goal of turning their creative project into a credible, backable startup. 

Venture Label partners were chosen by a wide variety of people, using the same methodology as both yCombinator and MIT to identify talent. Each project was supported by references from their peers, evidence from their fans or users that they meaningfully create behavior change, and a vision for a company that could become disruptive in nature. The team sought original inventions and industry game changers with strong potential to shake up culture, industry, creativity, and creation as we know it. In short, that they aligned with The Rattle’s mission.

Animas
Animas, a virtual reality tour guide and venue technology platform founded by musical artist Alexandria Rowan, found roots during the pandemic. When Rowan needed to perform, she simply built her own virtual show in which to perform for her fans. The earliest stage member of the group, The Rattle has helped her dig into her project ideas, craft her venture mission and her reputation as a great founder within the industry. By digging into why Animas was created, Rowan expanded on her original concept to allow any small city, town, or venue to become its own virtual reality showcase.  This concept allows for digital environments to run congruent with real-life festivals.

In August, Animas hosted its first prototype event in the River North Art District (RiNo) of Denver. The venture mission behind Animas is to reimagine how cultural tourism works for small and emerging cities.  During their first prototype, the entire interior of the show was filled with art available for purchase with 100% of the money given to the artists. Local vendors and breweries also filled the parking lot like a small village, inviting folks to walk right in as space was available.

With the first test event under their belt, the Animas team will host an Augmented Reality (AR) event, mingling VR technology in a real-world setting, in October. The event will showcase even more local art and vendors. There will also be an AR scavenger hunt, in which a couple partnering vendors will provide VR clothing participants can purchase, then scan for pop-ups of animated images and clues.

“I’ve found having outside eyes to provide direction on my choices as an artist and entrepreneur, learning about opportunities available to me, all has been appealing,” said Rowan. “The mindset shift to entrepreneur was a change I didn’t know I needed. And getting feedback was great--the co-working part of the process and getting to hang out with like-minded people has been wonderful. I can just be my weird self and connect with other weird, wonderful people being completely themselves. It’s a built-in community.” 

FINKEL
FINKEL was founded within The Rattle with a rather simple purpose: to show people how to "follow the fun" by enjoying art like it's a game and not taking everything in life too seriously. Founders Brian and Jane Spencer, a married couple and musical duo, piloted this concept with the idea to perform in Antarctica. Their idea grabbed the attention of a couple documentary filmmakers fascinated by their mission to record their journey and meet with communities around the globe, gather their stories, and have fun making music using sounds from the environment. The music itself is popular--almost mainstream--but built in unique ways that reflect the communities the music is inspired by while demonstrating the fun one can have along the way. This pilot inspired Brian and Jane to embrace The Rattle venture philosophy and evolve that concept into a dedicated entertainment and production company, blending "Anthony Bourdain for Music" with the mischievous and playful formats commonly found on TikTok. 

Their first documentary film, Islanders, is set to release this year. Islanders will include film, music, animations of the environment, all from Mackinac Island in Northern Michigan. This is FINKEL’s first project under the venture label, and the Rattle team will help them figure out what to do with the product once it’s made, including preparing for docuseries or feature length possibilities.

“Creativity has been such a huge benefit to our lives and the amount of vulnerability it takes to get out there and try something,” said Brian Spencer. “We hope to inspire others to step by their own ways in things, to get into new situations, and to be more vulnerable with themselves. We want to take away the fear around creativity, to show you can just mess around and have fun.  We’re simply highlighting human empathy, and the people and cultures that have a lot to bring to the musical conversation, all for the purpose of exploring creativity and getting vulnerable with people in a non-judgmental way. You don’t have to be an artist to be an artist. It’s our way of bringing people together.”

Based in London and LA, The Rattle has announced the first UK-based recipients of venture funding as part of its innovative Venture Label initiative. Investing in the community of artists, inventors, hackers, and innovators the incubator/disruptor space has gathered, The Rattle’s Venture Label program prioritizes original, human creation that changes the way people think and behave over “traction'' and “streaming numbers.” The first cohort of venture artists and startups, focused on music, technology, and entertainment, include Too Many T’s, Our Man in the Field, and Feed. (A second group of partners based out of The Rattle’s LA space will be announced in the coming weeks.)

Investors have backed The Rattle’s new initiative with a total of $1.5m, including investments from notable EU venture funds like LeanSquare. Each founder on the Venture Label is provided a dedicated team of venture builders to help develop their company. Many of these Venture Builders come from non-traditional backgrounds like business model hackers, community managers, web developers, and startup makers. Additionally, founders receive a stipend for a year, allowing them to focus on their project full-time. The goal in that year is to turn their creative project into a credible, backable startup. Key to The Rattle’s venture method is to identify what part of a creative’s activity constitutes developing a brand, and what constitutes developing a product.

“The reality is, the ‘product’ in the traditional recorded music industry is not the music itself. It’s the right to reproduce or perform music to an audience. That product is rarely wholly owned by the artists themselves,” explains The Rattle founder and CEO Chris Howard. “However, in the early-stages of an artist’s growth, their art is often the foundation of their brand. Their brand is therefore the key to forming a relationship with their audience instead of the product their fans buy. So, at the Venture Label, we explore and experiment with new product concepts that leverage the unique brand each artist, hacker, or inventor has made. This is what makes our method unique. We don’t rely on selling music, in other words.” 

Venture label teams were chosen by a wide variety of people. Instead of using streaming numbers of ‘traction’ to identify the best opportunities, they employed the same methodology as both yCombiunator and MIT to identify talent. Each project was supported by references from their peers, evidence from their fans or users that they meaningfully create behaviour change, and a vision for a company that could become disruptive in nature. The team sought original inventions and industry game changers with strong potential to shake up culture, industry, creativity, and creation as we know it. 

This cohort is the first in what The Rattle hopes becomes a tradition of challenging the status quo. “In some ways, this is an act of protest, of disruption,” Howard said. “We’re seeing what doesn’t work in creating viable careers in the entertainment and technology industries and taking those negative aspects down by making them irrelevant.”

Too Many T’s
The mission of London-based band Too Many T’s is to make hip-hop a club genre with an aura of positivity, reminiscent of the 1990s. Too Many T’s have reached cult status among fans in the UK, frequently selling out festivals. The duo grew increasingly aware that their unique aesthetic and approach meant they needed to use different tactics to grow. The unique vision of Too Many T’s includes expanding their product beyond music streaming by leveraging a startup technique known as ‘News Jacking’; after the launch of Echo Dot, the band hosted a hip hop jam live with an Amazon Alexa. Amazon bought that video as a means to connect to a new audience, and that technique has become a key part of Too Many T’s “product strategy.” Going forward, the duo  will be piloting products and concepts that build partnerships with their super fans to develop a unique “cooperative” where the band and their core community act as one company.

“We wanted to try something new. We’ve homed in on what they are doing at The Rattle,” says Ross Standaloft of Too Many T’s. “We joined the Venture Label because we are with them on their mission and we think it’s really cool and really interesting. It was a no-brainer. There is less pressure because of the fact that we don’t have to earn our base salaries from touring. This is a turning point for us.”

Our Man in the Field
UK-based Americana band Our Man in the Field, featuring lead singer-songwriter Alexander Ellis, also made The Rattle’s cut for venture partnership. Though his career seems to follow a familiar path--writing well-liked Americana music, performing alongside Grammy nominees and winners--Ellis hasn’t done a single traditional deal. By teaming up with music publishing legend, Steve Lewis through The Rattle’s network, he’s found core groups of advocates, developing strong relationships with them using startup-minded community building techniques. He uses this community to design products based on “customer feedback.”  all while making great music along the way. Despite producers, labels, and publishers scrambling to work with him, he’s maintained his startup-way of operating, which has led to Ellis raising significant Venture Capital from prominent UK investors and creating a business 90% more profitable than comparable artists at his stage. 

Feed
Feed, founded by Nick Edwards and Joshua Jacobson, is on a mission to help more people around the world turn their hobby, idea or passion into a business. Starting out as digital marketers in music, the founders noticed that artists’ organic posts were often the most compelling marketing content (as opposed to any bespoke ad creative)... and that it was incredibly hard to predict which posts were going to work best. So they embraced the situation and built their own AI-learning advertising technology designed specifically for small budgets. The platform identifies a user’s most engaging social media posts and leans into the content that gets the best response, running an automated marketing funnel on budgets starting from just a few dollars per day. The beta version has improved ad metrics like clickthrough rates and engagement by up to 10x versus their users’ other ads on a like-for-like basis. 

The Rattle Venture Label provided them a unique opportunity to develop their product in the presence of exactly the people they are aiming to help - something every startup wishes they could do, but is rarely given the opportunity.

“As digital collaboration enables partnerships between people working across multiple disciplines, communities like The Rattle are going to become ever more essential. By being part of the community, we want to play a part in making the projects of others more likely to succeed as businesses” notes Joshua Jacobson of Feed.

“For me, it’s about showing people examples of how it can be done in a different way. Often you look at someone like Kanye West and think to get to that level you have to be signed to a label,” reflects Feed’s Nick Edwards. “We want to show just how much individuals and small teams can achieve by themselves, when they have the right tools and resources to help them along the way.

Based in London and LA, The Rattle is announcing a $1.5-million investment round in its innovative Venture Label initiative. Investing in the worldwide community of artists, inventors, hackers, and innovators the incubator/disruptor space has gathered, The Rattle’s Venture Label program prioritizes original, human creation that changes the way people think and behave, rather than obsessing about “traction” and “streaming numbers.” The first cohort of artists and startups building ventures in music, technology, and entertainment will be announced in the coming weeks.

“We’re not here to pretend to be some new kind of record label or artist services model. We’re not here to talk about abstract things like artist empowerment. There’s been plenty of tinkering at the margins, and it hasn’t helped,” explains Chris Howard, Cofounder and CEO of The Rattle. “We’re here to build an entirely new foundation for creating and making careers in the art, music, and entertainment space that takes what’s helpful from venture-type investment, while never losing sight of artists’ and inventors’ role: to change what we do and how we think about the world.”

Investors have backed The Rattle’s new initiative with a total of $1.5m, including investments from notable EU venture funds like LeanSquare. "With LeanSquare we are really proud to be part of The Rattle adventure. Indeed, it is part of our DNA to participate in the co-creation of an entrepreneurial, virtuous and diverse music ecosystem with the artist in the center,” says Gérôme Vanherf, Venture Partner at LeanSquare. “We invest in tech start-ups and we create bridges between them and the global industry (with programs such as Wallifornia) and, The Rattle, with their Venture Label model, helps artists to develop their career using the same tools as ours. That is the perfect fit.”

The Rattle’s Venture Label terms, like the recipients they’re funding, are built on breaking the mold. Essentially, the label is standardizing the concept of turning an artist’s activity into a company and funding the development of that company. The Rattle’s relationship with the founders is built on equity, rather than licenses, IP ownership, or royalties - similar to yCombinator or Techstars. Traditional lenders or labels often take a cut, then artists and shareholders split from the net profit - if any. With The Rattle’s Venture Label, artists “pay” for The Rattle through a warrant on equity in their new company and can buy out The Rattle at any time. 

“That warrant on equity is a surprise for people,” said Howard. “Founders can buy us out on their own and get all their equity back. When we own equity, we are always a minority equity holder. We have no executive control at all, nothing. The point is to allow the founders entire control of what products they make and what art they make.”

Additionally, founders on The Venture Label receive a stipend for a year, allowing them to quit their other jobs and focus on their project. They also gain a venture team, which includes experts in non-traditional fields like growth hackers and technology specialists. The goal in that year is to turn their young project into a credible, backable startup.

“The entertainment industry offers little to no job security for artists, and the pandemic exposed that at a scale no one could imagine,” Howard said. “We felt the urgency factor. The Venture Label is trying to untangle the economic relationship from the creative relationship for artists. We’re trying to push people to see that they can be sustainably employed by their own creation.”

Today, The Rattle is announcing the full opening of its L.A. location, surviving against the odds throughout the first wave of the pandemic. Initially launched in March 2020, the music and technology incubator will now accept new members. They will help form the next generation of counter-culture pioneers within the L.A ecosystem, who are looking to improve the world through new art and technology inventions. 

“We are looking for the future leaders of creative and cultural movements to come and join us at Rattle L.A. and prove that there is a better way to develop creative founders and build sustainable startups around culturally important art and inventions.,” said Helen Sartory, Director of Rattle L.A. “At our core, we believe deeply in investing in and empowering visionaries who want to change the world for the better.” 

With its revolutionary business model that combines music label, laboratory, startup incubator, and art collective, The Rattle launched in Los Angeles three days before Covid-19 shut down the city. Undeterred, The Rattle’s first wave of artists, founders, and startups came together to reinvent how to continue making great art and great technology despite the ever worsening conditions outside. 

Its founding community of thirty progressive music artists, producers, startups, activists and crazy tech inventors had access to The Rattle’s one-of-a-kind facility in L.A. They also gained insights from a curated community of their peers and mentors who helped them hone their ideas into pioneering projects and build their skills as founders of their own startups.

Though a majority of their interactions were initially virtual, this first cohort of counter-culture founders have developed a vast array of original ideas, including:
 

- Heroine-centric operatic productions by Incorrigible Entertainment, who are planning to showcase their newest opera, Hildegard, based on the life of the 12th-century German saint and composer, using Virtual Reality;

- The creation of a social collaboration network called RYSE, which has developed an online community that enables artists and producers to work together on music projects;

- A first-of-its-kind, open-world “sonic artverse” called Animas created by electronic artist and polymath Dozier; a place where art, music, gaming, fantasy narratives, creators and fans come together in one interactive, immersive space;

- The band FINKEL who responded to the cancellation of their North American tour by creating a virtual livestream tour, visiting locations like Deep Space, ToonTown and Antarctica;

- A singer/songwriter named High School Jacob who has worked with the gaming community to design and release a retro video game with each new song on his new EP. 

Alexandria Rowan, aka “Dozier,” has seen firsthand the benefits of The Rattle approach while developing an immersive gaming/music/art world online. "Working with The Rattle has helped me quickly ascend to the next level and bring to fruition my dream for a narrative-based open-world dimension," said Rowan. "They helped kickstart my ideas by connecting me with industry trailblazers in gaming, VR, and music."

Before working with The Rattle, Dozier had never had the support to explore the possibilities of pairing the gaming world on Twitch with art and music fans, creating a virtual world for everyone to come and interact with one another. Dozier is most concerned with the art, music, and gaming aspects of her world-building, but her mentors at The Rattle in L.A. helped her to keep an eye on the logistical and strategic aspects of her goals as well. 

“Typically when working with record labels, artists are kept away from the numbers and the strategy; but we want the founders we work with to understand what’s working and what’s not alongside the why behind it,” said Helen Sartory, Director of Rattle L.A. “For example, we don’t want an artist’s marketing team having overbearing control over strategic decisions. We want to arm artists with the tools they need to stay in the driving seat and give the freedom to take whatever path makes sense for them as an individual. And often these tools don’t originate in music. They come from industries that develop alongside it. This is the core reason for having a diverse community of artists and technology inventors under the same roof.” 

In L.A., much like their founding site in London, these wave-makers are given much more than just a contract to produce a couple albums on the end of a short corporate-built leash. With its equity-based development approach to the artist-founders they take on, The Rattle is looking to help empower the creative, progressive, culture-shaping pioneers of the world. It hopes to forever change the way artists, founders, and inventors are funded, supported, and scaled.  

About The Rattle

Launched in 2018, The Rattle is a 300-person strong global community of the most progressive music artists, technology inventors, and innovators on a mission to kickstart a cultural revolution through the power of music. 

Visit www.wearetherattle.com for more information.

A radical new approach to supporting more “artists of business” that liberates creativity and promotes sustained innovation and social change

Spurred by decades of artist exploitation, The Rattle is publicly launching an alternative to the traditional record label by financing the development of an artists’ business, rather than simply buying their music and exploiting music rights. 

“When people think of the music business, they actually mean the music rights business, when companies buy and sell the right to reproduce or perform music,” explains Chris Howard, The Rattle’s CEO. “What we are talking about is the business - or venture - of music culture. When you untangle the way music and culture are created from the way music rights are traded, whole new industries can be born, liberating an artist to become a countercultural movement maker, not a mere content generator.”

Alongside music artists, the venture label will back budding creatives, counter culturists, inventors and technologists, nurturing powerful relationships between music makers and innovators from inception, sparking real breakthroughs in music and culture. “This demands a new path forward for emerging artists and new infrastructure — and that means new technology,” Howard says. “These two integral sides of the music culture business need to evolve in partnership.”

The Rattle Venture Partnership will back artists and inventors to transform music together by providing funding and resources in exchange for shares in each company the artist/inventor will own and control. Unlike a venture capital fund or a traditional “accelerator” like YCombinator, The Rattle’s new Venture Label works like a “venture studio,” where makers of counterculture are offered a dedicated creative team, financial support, facilities, and back office resources to launch a new company around their creativity. The goal: To keep creativity flowing, and run the slow and steady race to real artistic accomplishment with an unorthodox way of doing business in the music industry. 

“I’m lucky enough to work with a number of the world's great artists. As well as their undoubted creative abilities, what marks them out is their appetite for adventure and innovation, not just in their art but with how they approach the business of their art,” notes Brian Message, Co-manager Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Thom Yorke and advisor to The Rattle. “Fostering creativity beyond just their music creates all kinds of exciting opportunities. The Rattle caught my eye as it encourages artists to think as innovators and technologists to think of themselves as artists-of-business.”

In essence, the Rattle has taken all of the best parts of an accelerator, like teaming up with founders financially in a shared-risk way and supporting the merit of a founder’s creativity; and they have removed the soul-sucking parts of an accelerator, like teaching founders how to grovel to VCs on demo day or mashing their creative ideas into a market segment and sales pitch long before it’s time.  

“The pandemic broke all the rules around how you ‘start up’ as a music artist or technology founder,” says Howard. “Now the best way to succeed is to think and behave like a founder. Founders have a vision for how they want the world to change. They use their creativity and innovative spirit to make things that create that change, all while entertaining and moving their audiences or solving meaningful problems for society.”

The key advantage the Venture Label model has over traditional label or VC deals is that the founder sets the strategic agenda. They decide what gets made and why. Another benefit is the founder does not need to commit up front to repaying the label or VC with Royalties. Instead, they become commercially and culturally valuable by whatever means they wish, on a timeline that suits their inventive spirit. This allows for complete creative freedom and puts an end to oppressive, opaque contracts and endless recoupment burdens.

In hidden development since 2018, The Rattle successfully raised $2m in private investment from notable leaders in music and technology like Steve Lewis, Ross Mason, and Imogen Heap to prototype and test their new model with 6 music artists and 4 technology inventors. After a successful pilot, The Rattle will open its new Venture Label to an additional 50 new artists, countercultural hackers, and technology inventors starting January 2021, laying the foundations for an entirely new music economy based on proven startup principles.

“By providing a structure to develop great artists/inventors as founders, we can create a truly progressive music universe free from unfair exploitation and creative restrictions,” notes Howard. “We want more Banksys, Björks, and Greta Thunbergs. And fewer unsuspecting artists who don’t realize their only commercial goal is to make someone else rich.”

Not all labels are the same, however, and many have developed their own innovative, ingenious responses to the rapid change of the past two decades. “We recognise the music economy has made some fantastic positive changes in the past few years,” Howard explains. “The Rattle Venture Label has spent 2 years ensuring it is compatible with how pioneering labels, management, and publishing are choosing to operate. But early sources of financing and support largely remain intertwined with outdated deal structures, which are often accused of exploiting creatives and not aligning with their interests.”

The Rattle Venture Partnership liberates creators entirely from this by offering genuine shared risk and gain between those who invest in art & technology and the artist or inventor themselves without dictating creative output. The novel structure is an “equity sharing” contract to form a new venture for artists and inventors alike. 

About The Rattle

Launched in 2018, The Rattle founded as a 250 person strong global community of the most progressive music artists, technology inventors, and innovators on a mission to kickstart a cultural revolution through empowering pioneering inventors and enablers of music culture. The London based company will be opening applications for its new Venture Label from October 2020 to start January 2021.

Visit www.wearetherattle.com for more information.