Startling Music is a music publishing company, founded by musician Ringo Starr, drummer of The Beatles.

Starr had initially been signed to Northern Songs, the company set up by publisher Dick James and Beatles manager Brian Epstein on behalf of the band in 1963. As the main songwriting Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney drew a larger share of benefits (and royalties) from their contract, while Starr and George Harrison were sometimes given second-class treatment, and found their songs and interests under-promoted by the company.

When Northern Songs was turned into a public company, Starr and Harrison were each given part-ownership (their shares together totalling about 1.8% of the venture), on top of the writer's royalties from their published songs. This wasn't incentive enough to re-sign with Northern Songs, though, as Lennon and McCartney (who owned about 15% each) did in 1968, when the band's publishing deal expired. Instead, Harrison started his own publishing company, Harrisongs, and Starr followed suit, establishing Startling Music. Both were thus somewhat insulated when Northern Songs fell victim to a buyout from ATV in 1969. (Ironically, while Lennon and McCartney made the most of the situation by cashing in their shares in the company they no longer controlled, Starr and Harrison retained theirs, and continued to have a minority voice in Northern Songs.)

David Hentschel is an English recording engineer, writer and music producer who engineered on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass and Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, as well as with artists including Genesis, Elton John, Ringo Starr, Queen, Marti Webb, Andy Summers, Mike Oldfield, Peter Hammill and Ronnie Caryl.

Hentschel's career began at Trident Studios in London where he was initially an assistant before rising to become one of the in-house producers. In addition to engineering and production credits, Hentschel also played early synthesizers with a diverse range of bands including Nazareth, Pilot and Byzantium. He played synthesizer on several high profile recordings, including Elton John's "Rocket Man" and "Funeral for a Friend" from the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album. "Funeral for a Friend" featured an early analogue synthesizer, the ARP 2500, to create tonal feeling and effect.

After leaving Trident in 1974, he produced his own album Startling Music for Ringo Starr's short lived record label, Ring O'Records, consisting of a song-by-song cover of Ringo's first album and featuring performances by Phil Collins, David Cole, Ronnie Caryl, John Gilbert and Starr. He then began a successful collaboration with the band Genesis which resulted in five albums beginning with A Trick of the Tail in 1976.

Richard Starkey, MBE (born 7 July 1940), better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the Beatles. When the band formed in 1960, Starr was a member of another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He joined the Beatles in August 1962, taking the place of Pete Best. In addition to his drumming, Starr is featured on lead vocals on a number of successful Beatles songs (in particular, "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Yellow Submarine", and the Beatles version of "Act Naturally"). He is credited as a co-writer of the songs "What Goes On" and "Flying", and as the writer of "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden".

As drummer for the Beatles, Starr was musically creative, and his contribution to the band's music has received high praise from notable drummers in more recent times. Starr described himself as "your basic offbeat drummer with funny fills". Drummer Steve Smith said that Starr's popularity "brought forth a new paradigm" where "we started to see the drummer as an equal participant in the compositional aspect" and that Starr "composed unique, stylistic drum parts for The Beatles songs". In 2011, Starr was picked as the fifth-best drummer of all-time by Rolling Stone readers.

Horse the Band is a band from Lake Forest, California who are best known for their 8-bit Nintendo-influenced sound combined with metalcore. Frontman Nathan Winneke once described their sound as "Nintendocore," although the band have gone to lengths reiterating that this merely describes the sound, not the substance.

HORSE the Band was started in Lake Forest, CA in 1999 while founding members Erik Engstrom and David Isen were attending El Toro High School. The band were originally to be called The Mexican Economy, however in an effort to avoid being viewed as racist, the moniker HORSE The Band was eventually adopted. The name had to be altered further to prevent copyright issues from becoming another problem (a woman with the name of "Horse"); and so it was that HORSE The Band was born. The band booked its own parental financed tours starting the summer of 2002, including a 3-month tour spanning seven countries. With a carefully maintained web presence including their MP3.com and Myspace accounts, they successfully accrued a minor cult following.